Interview with Kevin Devine, November 18, 2005

ECR: Last year in an interview with the Daily Texan, you said “with Kerry I thought it was a really flaccid campaign and I thought he just tried to pick up everyone to the left of Bush, being as close to him as possible on a lot of key issues and I thought that was kind of a cowardly way to run”, now, a year after the election, how do you feel about the democratic party as a whole? How do you feel about their future?

KD: I’m excited…I’m excited that Howard Dean is running the party because I think…I was bummed out about Howard Dean a little bit too, because I think he kind of did this thin…when he first started out I was like “F***in’ A this guy’s gonna be awesome” but he got like up to the cliff and was like “woah, I can’t actually believe these things because that would be way too revolutionary and dangerous for an American leader”. So like, I think that he copped out, but I have this weird feeling like when I see him on talk shows or hear him now, I think he knows he did a little bit and I think he’s really trying to shake that party up…He was very unpopular when he started…people were really angry when he got that position. And I mean the roots of what made Dean such an appealing choice as a leader at the very outset…I mean the first time I heard about Howard Dean was the Spring of 2003, a full year and a half before the actual election because we were on tour with this band Sorry About Dresden from Saddle Creek Records and their drummer is involved in local politics in North Carolina, he’s on the city council in Durham, he’s a very think globally act locally kind of guy and I love that, like he is someone who puts a guy like me to shame because I’m sitting here yelling about all this S*** but he’s like “yeah, you yell, I’ll be in some boring policy meeting with some F***ing teachers board or something like that” but he was all about Dean and he told us all about him…And the fact that this guy was using the internet and using college campuses and using…Disaffected kids who might have been Nadarites in 2000 and was like “we need to make something happen here”. I thought that was great. My problem with the Democratic party is that there’s no guts there. They’re a centralist, moderate group of privileged white people who turn their backs on the back bone of their constituency and principles and I think it’s sad and I almost have more respect for the Republican party because at least they come right out and tell you “We don’t care about black people, we don’t care about poor people, we don’t care about gay people, we don’t care about unwed teenage mothers all we care about is rich people and fetuses” and at least they come out and say it “we want people to go to war and keep us rich but we don’t want to do it” there’s much less of a smokescreen and everyone goes up in arms about Rove and Bush and…You knew those guys were gonna be horrible. It’s surprising when you find out that Clinton blows up a pharmaceutical plant in Iraq because he acts like he thinks it’s a weapons/ammunition factory…Those guys are supposed to be the good guys. What do I think about it now? If Hilary Clinton is the one who’s gonna run for F***ing office, I’m very torn like it’s great she’s a woman…But she’s a F***ing…she’s blue blood through and through. She knows the game, she plays it great…If she has Oprah run with her, I would vote for her then…but…What I think about the Democratic party is that I think they’ve really severed ties with what made them an important social engine for a long time…And…If they ever have the guts to run on any kind of a platform like the ones…that like even F***ing Jimmy Carter…Jimmy Carter ruined his presidency because he had the balls to say “We’re in an energy crisis, stop driving your car”. He said that and he might as well have signed his death warrant. I’m hopeful for the Democratic party, but…I don’t wanna be a Michael Moore, Michael Moore, God bless him, he’s a muckraker, he has wonderful ideas and he really cares but he’s a true believer and anyone who’s gonna get up and tell me Ramsey Clark or any of these people are agents of change…I don’t believe in it. Stop believing in it, because you’re always gonna get let down. Always gonna be let down.

ECR: I know a lot of people who are Democrats who have problems with Michael Moore. What do you think about Michael Moore?

KD: I like Michael Moore. I like that he exists. To me Michael Moore is to Liberal politics what Nirvana is to punk rock, it’s an introduction and it’s by no means…like…You’re not supposed to hear one Nirvana record and think you know everything about the Butthole Surfers or early Sonic Youth, you’re supposed to go and listen to them…And that was what their point was for a lot of people. Michael Moore will be the first one to tell you “I am in no way a Noam Chomsky, if you listen to what I say and it appeals to you in any way, go read this because this will F***ing knock you on your ass…Chomsky, Howard Zinn…” But…My problem with Michael Moore is that he’s still a true believer and he doesn’t go far enough. You’re never gonna have the kind of change…No one’s gonna vote in a revolutionary, it’s just a contradiction of terms. And I don’t know how to reconcile it in my head yet and I’m not a politician...I just write about things…but I know that it’s in there and it’s kicking around.

ECR: Obviously gas prices are soaring right now, so how do you even tour in America and turn even a little profit?

KD: I don’t know that I do. I mean…I’m really bad with money and if I tour and it’s cash and you get paid $100 a night and you make $200 on merchandise a night I’m that guy who forgets things like “Oh I have to pay for gas or Oh, five dollars of this ten I made on this record has to go back to Triple Crown, or now Capitol.” I forget all that and I’m like “I got F***ing three-thousand dollars in my pocket man!” and like, I come home and then I realize that like I have to pay rent and within two weeks I’m like “Oh yeah that’s right, after I pay my bills and pay rent and pay everyone out I have like $800 left from three months of work”. So, like, honestly, all the corporatism and all the scary things that I know are like open jawed steel traps about signing to Capitol that’s the one thing that…I didn’t make some sick 50 Cent money, I didn’t even make Death Cab For Cutie money. But, I made enough money that I can like work a part time job, put stuff on the side, live in an apartment where I’m happy and tour…And if I don’t turn a profit on tour and have a little nut put aside, it’s not gonna last very long. If I don’t do the right thing, it’ll be gone by the time I’m thirty. But…I can tell you this, in Europe it’s even higher and I just toured there, a very successful tour where we were headlining shows…18 shows in 18 nights, no days off…We did…I think between 50 and 250 people a night, guarantees between 400 and 1000 Euros a night, sold out of merchandise except for like six t-shirts and a box of double vinyls…And I lost money. So I don’t….I mean…I didn’t get killed but…After I paid for mine and the three bands members plane tickets, paying for gas, paying for the driver, paying the percentage to the tour people, paying the merch people, I’m really lucky I did the last week in the UK where I had no transportation costs and was able to just pay on CDs because I think I broke even. It was a tour where I never played in front of less than 50 people and played to up to 400 people, sold no less than 20 records a night…and I broke even. […] How a guy on my level makes money touring? I’m psyched when I come home and I have my rent money. And this Capitol thing at least affords me the chance to have a little bit of breathing room with that.

ECR: So, with the cost of gas and everything have you considering switching over to bio-diesel at all?

KD: I’ve been thinking about reading more about that…The one thing I’m nervous about is the efficiency of it and the regular availability of it on a tour. I know all those like…I know the Piebald guys siphon gas out of MacDonalds oil…That S***’s great…But…They also are road dogs so it might have made…I just know…I’ve thought about like if there is a little bit more for like tour support and stuff, things like…I don’t even know if there’s a larger car unit Hybrid, if they make like a van you can hitch a trailer to. As it stands, I’m just trying to bite the bullet and spend the money.

ECR: I was reading through some of your interviews and everything and when you interviewed Chuck Phaliniuk, you asked him what scared him about the character Victor in the novel Choke and he responded “He wastes his entire life. He may never find himself because he’s anesthetizing himself”. There’s a clear parallel between Victor and the character in your song “Buried by the Buzz”. Did you take any inspiration from that at all?

KD: I can see what you’re saying...There’s two people that are…The person in “Buried by the Buzz” can see the brick wall at the end of the tunnel and doesn’t particularly give a S***, is like plummeting at it. It’s someone that…Is conscientious and sensitive about the world and scared S***less about the world and the answer is in a bottle or in a pi-or in a bag or…you know…he puts it up his nose or drinks it down his throat and kills his fears about where we’re going, his fears about where he’s going, so yeah, they’re very similar in that sense. I wasn’t thinking specifically at all about that character but I can totally see what you’re saying and sadly, you know, I think it’s similar to a lot of people I know, I mean…I was in a really F***ed up place about a year ago and I had been for quite a while and I’m just starting to coming out of it in the last like six months or so where I feel a lot more like present or able to…be accountable for myself. But “Buried by the Buzz” is very literally what it says. It’s like a guy who…I mean it says it… “I saw it all, I knew what I was doing, I knew what was happening and I thought all these F***ed up things about it,” It was like that thing where like you’d watch the news just slack-jawed and go “Oh, this is real” or you’d watch people die or you’d watch relationships deteriorate or you’d watch yourself do things that you’re like “I can’t believe I did that” and your response to all of that was like (makes sniff/gulp noises), you know just like “kill it, kill it, kill it, it’s not real, it’s not real”. And I think that that’s what that character did in that book with sex if I remember properly. And it’s sadistic because he would do some pretty punishing things to himself too and I can definitely relate to that with the other stuff…I would definitely over do things and do it on purpose and know I was doing something to hurt myself and be like “F*** it, I don’t care” and I can see what you’re saying absolutelty.

ECR: When you reviewed Animal Farm on the same site, you stated quite beautifully “We’re choosing death by amusement. Big brother doesn’t need to watch you 24/7 when you’re too busy watching Road Rules to care about what’s actually happening,” I just wanted to know how you feel about television in general and how people get their information.

KD: Well, the internet democratizes information in an interesting way…but…I am just as prone to lapsing into a bulls*** like blowout marathon on a Sunday afternoon as the next person is, I feel gross about myself after I do it, but I’m just as like…We’re brought up on trash so eventually, trash becomes…I can go out right now and go and eat a MacDonald’s burger and fries and love it and I’m not sitting there politicizing the act of eating it, I’m not politicizing the act of watching My Super Sweet Sixteen until after I’ve absorbed the food and after it’s sunken in my head that these are actual sixteen year old girls that think that time started the day they were born.

ECR: That show is the most nauseating thing on Earth.

KD: It’s actually scary that show because it really shows what is there. And I’d like to think-there’s this part of me that’s like maybe MTV put this show on the air to show the absolute dregs of humanity but they didn’t they did it to be like “look these girls are princesses,” What I think about TV is that that Postman book Amusing Ourselves to Death […] everyone should have to read it, period. I mean, it’s scary and it’s terrifying but it’s F***ing brilliant and right, there’s no argument, it’s right. I think TV was fine when it was a choice and it was entertainment and it was a way to unwind in a well informed society and in a committed democratic society-I don’t know if these are all-I didn’t live in the 40’s or-TV was fine when it was a piece of a puzzle, but when entertainment becomes politics, when entertainment becomes information when like-I can’t watch-When they’re covering a war on CNN and they’re showing me the different types of missile systems like I’m playing a videogame and it’s cut to look like a videogame so that a kid watching it’s gonna go “wow, cool,” or when I can’t get a news brief without like attendant music. This is the news, I don’t need a F***ing score to the news, and it’s funny but it’s totally F***ed up and it’s F***ed with the way we’re capable of receiving things, it’s F***ed with what we expect-I mean I’m really just poorly paraphrasing Manufacturing Consent here, the Chomsky stuff but like…It shouldn’t matter whether I’m physically attracted to the person reading me the news. It’s news, it’s F***ing information. And that’s not even starting with the selectivity of what makes it through to the news and what we say is news now. And the thing is-When I was a little younger-When I first started to get sort of ravaged in my head about this stuff and get more politicized about this stuff, I got really mad at the American public because I was like “Why aren’t people listening to things like Democracy Now, why aren’t people reading A People’s History of the United States, why don’t people know about Arundhati Roy-well, you know what, it’s all part of the system, not to sound like some F***ing conspiracy theorist but I believe this S*** so I’ll say it. It’s all part of-It’s not an accident that income drops, real estate rates soar, unemployment rates soar, education rates plummet and people are still working 55 hour weeks, because if you have a dumb, overworked populous, no one’s gonna go out of their way-Someone that lives in Decorah, Iowa doesn’t have the same access to media outlets that I do so they’re not gonna know about Amy Goodman, they’re not gonna know about Noam Chomsky and it’s all connected to the maintenance of privilege , when, the books that get read-the books that get chosen to get read are just things-You work a fifty hour week all you give a S*** about is having enough food for yourself and your kid and your patch of grass and being able to go watch movies on the weekend or paying your alimony payments or-you know what I mean like-The modern American family structure is so, so F***ed and it’s so-the way we work and the way we-It doesn’t help at all. And so I really believe that like-I can’t be mad at those people-maybe-this is so F***ing-maybe this is the most pretentious thing I’ll ever say but, maybe the role of someone-because I’m always trying to constantly justify to myself why it’s ok for me to be able to make any kind of money at singing songs I write when other people are working 100 hour weeks F***ing-whether its like washing floors at a restaurant or F***ing-just-garbage detail, F***ing-just some work that no one wants to do. Whether I’m scraping at this or not, this is not scarping this is something that I love and I work my ass off to do it and I’m tired and all that but…I get to sing and write. Maybe the role-maybe that my job-maybe what makes it justifiable is that-maybe…I can on a tour and I can play at a college like I did in Decorah, Iowa and I can sing a song like “No Time Flat” and I can talk about Amy Goodman and Democracy Now and F***ing you know alternative media and Indiemedia.org and all these other outlets and maybe that’s my job and maybe that’ll help me sleep better at night or maybe that’s real but what I think about TV is like, if you don’t take it too seriously and it doesn’t eat you alive it’s fine and we don’t have one right now in our apartment and I want to have one because I want to watch the Knicks games and I like Arrested Development and I like my HBO and all that but…I’m really happy because my brain is a lot less crowded. I just am like “Oh I can listen to records when I’m at home or I can read a book or something or do something,” it’s kind of nice, you know? I run around a lot and I’m busy and I’m always moving from place to place…But I could be so much more involved in being a change agent than I am. I feel very passionately about these things and they break my heart actually…It’s stuff that…If left to my own devices it makes me kind of crazy. But I don’t like volunteer at a soup kitchen or F***ing go like picket outside a recruitment office or F***ing do some real kind of culture jamming stuff like risking myself or risking-I mean-There are things that I think are really righteous and true that in my head I really want someone else to do because I don’t want to have to do them myself and that’s-What’s more American than that? So I mean if I’m gonna stand up on stage and sing these songs I don’t wanna have any illusions about-I do want all these things and I’ll always be right there to-You know I was brought up by two parents that were very different, my dad was a more conservative New York City cop, Irish, which doesn’t connote all the bad things you’d think, he was also a very sort of compassionate and sensitive guy but, you know, it does have a lot of the sort of attendant things you would think, you know, sort of a really nice, defanged homegrown New York prejudice and a mother that was a total hippie. And I think she totally softened him up a lot and I think he also kind of made her a little less of a hippie. But they both were so strident and ardent about what they believed and really about like the good in people. That was always drilled into me, the good in people. And I really took that and I really think that like for me now…I want to say what I think and I want it to mean something and I want to be able to have some kind of impact in some kind of a way but I also know that like you’re a hypocrite the second you start talking like that.

ECR: What was growing up like for you?

KD: Part of why I think a lot of the things I think-I came up in a very-now I see it and I feel like the luckiest guy but I came up in sort of the hardcore scene in Staten Island, New York which was a very insolated place and the hardcore scene, I see it now, was so reactionary because Staten Island is such a F***ing backwards place. I’ve always described it in my head as like if you took like 1950’s segregationist South, made it a little bit less obvious and moved it to New York now, that’s kind of what I think of it. Like all the blacks and Puerto Ricans and poor people live on the North shore all the like middle class to upper middle class mafia families and like retired Irish cops and firemen live on the South shore and if you see one from one place in the other place it’s not really…and I guess down on Bay street-down near the ferry now there’s like kind of an artsy little place, it’s kind of like anywhere there’s like one little artist community that’s kind of coming up-but like the scene there was so politicized and so-I mean they took a lot of cues from the Discord thing and Ian MacKaye and all that but like-I was fourteen years old listening to like Nirvana and Pavement-cool bands, bands that I still-are like much more musically influential on me than anything I ever heard in that scene, but like bands that were like too nervous-like Nirvana tried but like, they would stand for something and then they’d make fun of themselves for standing for it kind of thing-like there wasn’t a lot of strength in their convictions-it was very ironic. Those guys in those shows I used to go to when I was a kid were like vegan straight edge F***ing monsters these guys were just like ripping S*** up-and then I would talk to them and they kind of like me because I was like-this weird little kid who liked indie rock music and they saw it as something they could kind of mold or something and like, you know, we always had those things, those food drives and we would do like benefits for the gay men’s health crisis and like animal rights fundraisers and do these things that like were really-now that I think about it were pretty radical for a group of like F***ing white bread fifteen year old kids with a lot of vowels in their names from Staten Island you know and like, if I didn’t have that experience I wouldn’t care about the things I care about now. So I feel like it’s a mixture of like coming up an indie rocker in a punk rock scene with two parents that even if it wasn’t what-exactly-they thought-they were strident about the things they did think kind of made it so now I feel like this weird compulsion to say what I think about these things and also I feel this compulsion to make sure I’m not full of S*** when I’m saying it and be able to call bullS*** on myself when I know you know-I can say these things about-I think about what I would really do if I get-if I was to get drafted, if I’d really send it back in the mail or if I’d back out- that would be the true test of the song and I’d like to think that I would-anyway this is a long ways off what you were talking about, I just kind of got distracted.

ECR: Do you feel like being on a major label is going to put you out where more people can get a hold of you?

KD: I think that for me-I had this thing a couple years ago where I was like “I’d never do that, I’d never do that”. And I said that in print-which is always a smart thing to do, but I was also-I didn’t know which end was up in my life at that point and I was just grasping at straws and I said a lot of S*** to a lot of people that-that just happened to be when I said things to someone publicly. What it does is this, I know exactly what it is and I know that the 95% chance is that I’ll fight like hell to make one record that I really love, they won’t know what to do with it, there won’t be a clear cut single, it’ll sell 10,000 copies and then I’ll get dropped, that’s the 95% chance, because that’s what happens. 100 bands put out major label records, one of them hits, one of them hits enough to sell more than 50,000 records, point one of that hits. The difference is, I’ve done the-I’ve been on indie labels forever. The indie labels that I want to be on they don’t know me or they don’t wanna know me or they can’t risk it to put-I’ve gotten from every cool label you can think of “I really like what you do but we don’t have the income to just risk on somebody who is not a sure bet right now” and I’m not a sure bet. I have a lot of wonderfully devoted fans but I also sell like 3,000-5,000 records. So, the sad truth of it is, what it came down to for me at the end there was, my Triple Crown contract was up I love the guy-I love Fred Feldman, I think he’s an awesome F***ing dude, but Triple Crown Records was when I signed me, Brand New and a bunch of like emo and hardcore bands and I’ve done that forever. Immigrant Sun when I put my first record out was me and a bunch of hardcore bands, Fadeaway where Miracle of 86 did it’s first record was us and a bunch of Long Island emo bands like, you know, Miracle did a record on Lakeshore which was cool because that was the first place that like Queens of the Stone Age and Grandaddy, but, Lakeshore, they’re a movie house they did our record, it got released and they went (wipes hands) boom, I never heard from those people again, like it was almost like if I just gave it to anybody to put it out. So like, with this thing, with Triple Crown being-tried doing this incubator thing with Lee R. Cohen over at Warner Brothers, Triple Crown’s part of that world too now, if I was on Triple Crown I was gonna get like uh-what’s it called-upstreamed. So instead of being on an indie rock label with bands that made no sense, Brand New was gone, I loved Brand New, when they first did their first record I didn’t even think I was gonna-I knew those guys, we used to play together all the time I wasn’t into what they were doing-I loved Jesse, I thought he was a cool kid, but someone was like “you gotta hear this new record” I thought “oh, all right” and then I heard it and I was like “woah, where did that come from?”.

ECR: I think it came from him going from like eighteen into his twenties.

KD: Exactly. Exactly. And I think the next one’s gonna be even better. But like, they were gone so it was like, I could be on this label where I’m an indie rock singer/songwriter kind of weird thing that, on one level kind of connects with the crowd that this label kind of caters to and still be-they’re attached to a major label anyway. Capitol has cool bands that I actually like to some extent, they have a history of having bands that are like the building blocks of rock music. The guy who works there who approached me is a guy who works with Aimee Mann with Michael Penn, worked with Elliott Smith works on the-On the publishing side has worked with The Arcade Fire with Death Cab For Cutie, every one of these bands are bands that I love or like or at least respect immensely. I got assurences from him and from the people-I played for the president of the company I played him “Damned Old Dad”, “Keep Ringing Your Bell” and “No Time Flat” there’s not a single out of any of those three songs, they all have curses, one of them is about F***ing attempting to take down the exact system that his stockbrokers pay him to be part of and he was like “we have to sign that guy”. To me, they took more of a risk than any indie rock label ever took on me ever. So they have balls for signing me because, I might make them, I have-I sat down as close as I’m sitting to you to the president of Capitol Records and told him “I don’t think I’m gonna sell you any records” and he told me “Well that’s why we have other bands” so like, you know, that may not be true next year but also the popular culture climate right now, who the F*** knows, a guy like me could have a modest hit with something.

ECR: Historically, in times of war and kind of, terribleness in a country there’s been kind of an explosion of folk music. I can totally see trends going in the same direction now, there are people like you, Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom and Sufjan Stevens to name a few, there’s definitely a larger movement in folk rock right now, do you think that Capitol wants to get in on that?

KD: Well, they’re not stupid. I would love to sit here and be like-I’m sure they’re aware and I’m sure that they want to get a slice of the pie. I can’t think of things like that just because then it’ll make me not wanna get out of bed in the morning. I know what I’m dealing with and I know that-There’s people at that record company whose job it is is to do some kind of focus demographic thing and go “well, 300,000 people like Bright Eyes and he’s played with Bright Eyes and the press compares him to Bright Eyes so we should sign him” and I know that someone there thought that. I also know that there’s other people there that really are like “you’re F***ing great and I want to work with you and more people should hear your stuff and if I can help do that, that’s why I got involved with music”. It’s the same as any other place, they’re not all demons and ogres working in that building, there’s some people in there that really give a S***. But the thing that I’ve always had a problem with for me and I’ll have a problem with it forever and that’s why I just have to try to make a go of it-I don’t exactly fit anywhere. I don’t exactly fit with Devendra Banhart, I don’t exactly fit-I’m a little too mainstream, I like a song to have a kind of-I don’t write hooks necessarily, my songs aren’t inaccessible. I don’t act like a freak like a lot of like other singer/songwriters do, I don’t act like umm-But I don’t-I rock too hard for some folk stuff but I don’t rock enough for some punk stuff. It’s too indie rock for an emo kid but it’s too emo for an indie rock kid. But then all of them-but the cool thing is-out of all of these places, some people love it. That’s like- and I’m very lucky because the people that I’ve found that are fans of mine are very passionate. And I feel like that’s the thing-any band I’ve ever loved, that’s been-that’s been how I’ve been about them. I don’t listen to music casually, like, you’d be surprised at how-I have tons of records but I really listen to the same eight or nine things over and over again because it’s so viscerally important to me that I don’t know how to engage with the casual-I’m that asshole who gets into arguments about like-I’ve had to really get-be able to calm it down where like-I wouldn’t be able to deal with like-some awesome hip hop thing or some great dance song that’s just, you just wanna dance and it’s fun because all I’m thinking about is “what is this asshole saying” some music’s not there for that and it took me a long time to learn that but everything I’ve always reacted to has been something that just like ripped something apart in me and if I can be that to anybody, that’s the biggest compliment that someone could afford me and it makes me wanna just keep doing it forever, even if I’m making twelve dollars at it. And I mean the cool thing about the Capitol thing is, they, like you know, I really do feel like the people I’m working with there, I could get devastated by it and tell a totally different story a year from now but, I work with a wonderful F***ing awesome down to earth manager who I’ve worked with since I was a 20 year old kid and whose been like-seen all of it and never pushed it and always let me take the course I took and when I got to a place when I just called him one day and said “I think I’m ready to try some stuff” and he said “ok” and that’s when he like, did what managers do. But if I tell him “I don’t want to do this” it doesn’t happen. If I tell him “I don’t feel comfortable with that”, like he is as progressive and on board as can be and outside the box and thoughtful and the people that I’m dealing with there, they just seem like they wanna be involved with something that means something and the excitement level-I’m not saying that’s that what I am, I love what I do and if other people do, that’s F***ing great-but they really seem like to look at this project as something where they can almost validate their existence, at a label like that, and that’s-if you have people riled up and your selling 5,000 records and people at Capitol in the F***ing building know who you are, they got people that, they are selling 200,000 records for that they don’t even know who their F***ing names are, so I’m excited about that.

ECR: I think, I mean, I’ve never been the type of person to, when I read that you signed to Capitol this Summer I was really F***ing proud and happy and glad that you-You always seemed like the kind of person that I was like “I hope to god he makes some F***ing money because he works his ass off”, like when Death Cab For Cutie signed to Atlantic-

KD: Yeah. How could you hold it against them? And they’ve been writing-I like Death Cab-it’s not like F***ing Husker Du, they are the most accessible thing ever. It’s almost surprising to me that they didn’t just start on a major label. Their music is so inclusive and warm and like-they’re one of those bands that like-the same thing like-to me, Brand New or Jesse in particular as a person and Jesse as a performer are two-Jesse is one of my closest friends now and I love him and I think he’s a smart, compassionate, artful to use a stupid word, but like a, he’s a great guy and there’s so much in there and to have a guy like him-a young guy like him-he’s my-I think he’s a year older than me but-to have like a mid-twenties someone who cares that much be in the mainstream can’t help but be good because he’s no dummy and he cares, he really believes in it and he cares, but as a performer how can anyone-Jesse should be the biggest-Jesse is a rock star, he totally wants to be a rock star. He wants to be a rock star the way that Chris Martin and Bono are and I can’t do that-I don’t know how other people can do it-but Jesse can sit down across the table from you and tell you all about-it’s just-he’s gonna do it his way. And somehow, 500,000 people will love it, without him doing something corny or cheesy they’ll just-his conviction will carry it. That’s not me. I wanna-if I could have like Elliott Smith’s career, if I could have Pavement’s career, sell 100,000 records have a bunch of, Built to Spill, whoever the F***, I’d be the happiest guy ever. But Jesse wants to be U2, and he might actually do it, that’s the F***ing great thing. He might actually wind up five years from now, Brand New might be that band. They might not but…

ECR: The first time I saw Brand New I was like 16, they were opening for someone and he was kind of a little shy on stage, there were only like 100 people there, and I bought their record and talked to him and he was a nice guy and then I saw them again like three years later and he was a completely different person.

KD: Something just clicked in that kid between those two records where he was like “I’m F***ing going for it, I don’t care, I’m gonna see what happens” and that’s-for me my relationship that I’ve built with him has been like-the timing could not have been better because he really-When I was making “Split the Country, Split the Street”- we had become closer, I’d done some touring with them and we’d kept in touch and I’d known him on and off for years but we always would kind of like bump into each other-it was like a mutual respect there but we didn’t know each other very well. And like, when I was making “Split the Country” and I was like “I just want some things to”-like I had these ideas and I had these-he was like this guy that would just sit down and be like “don’t be afraid to think like this.” He was like-this is gonna sound really stupid because I have wonderfully supportive friends and family but he was like outside of it and he was this guy who I respected that sat down and was like “you’re F***ing great, be great.” And like, that’s silly, that-but when someone says that to you, you’re like “all right” you know what I mean? Like you kind of shake some of that self-consciousness and you’re like...like now I have in my head, like I actually think what I’m thinking about making, like I made “Split the Country” and I made “Make The Clocks Move” and I love those records but I was F***ed up the whole time I made those records, they are not good because I was drunk and high, they’re good in spite of it. And now I’m like-everything still happened where I’m in this place where I have the opportunity to make a record with amazing people on this level that I never thought I would ever be at and I’m present-minded and able to do it so that little Jesse voice in my ear is like “you can do something special with this if you want to.” And I don’t know if that’s cheesy or not but for the first time I’m like owning some kind of ambition and like I really feel hopeful about it. I really feel hopeful about it and we’ll see what happens.

-NL