BAND: Thursday
INTERVIEWER: Meghan Armbrecht (meghan@bandvibe.com)
INTERVIEWEE: Tom Keeley of Thursday
DATE OF INTERVIEW: 05.03.06
BAND MEMBERS:
Tom Keeley
Tim Payne
Geoff Rickly
Steve Pedula
Tuker Rule
Andrew Everding
Meg: So the new record came out yesterday… how does it feel?
Tom: Hasn’t really sunk in yet to be honest. I feel like we’ve been waiting forever for this record to come out. I actually woke up yesterday and forgot it was coming out. I woke up and saw Andrew and he had bought himself a copy and I was like “Oh right… one of the most important days of the year for us. I should probably pay attention.” But now that it’s out I’m sure in a week it will really hit me.
Meg: Who came up with the idea for tonight’s secret MySpace show?
Tom: I forget whose idea it was originally. I think it was something that MySpace asked us to do. We’ve got a really good community of friends on MySpace on our Thursday page. This just seemed like a little special thing we could do for people who are involved.
Meg: What made you pick The Stone Pony for tonight?
Tom: You know there’s something eerie about it… we were talking it about it before… something eerie about Asbury Park. So for something special, for a secret show it just sort of seemed to…
Meg: Fit the mood?
Tom: Yeah… really well. And we’ve never actually played here so, you know, being from Jersey you have to play The Stone Pony. You’re not a real NJ band until you’ve played here so hopefully we’re going to graduate to the upper echelon of real Jersey bands after tonight.
Meg: What’s your take on the whole MySpace thing in terms of music… good? Questionable?
Tom: For music I think it’s great. I mean back when we started the only reason people knew about us was because of word of mouth. There was MP3.com at the time and while we were on tour every time we could get to a computer we’d be online checking to see if anyone was listening to our music. I don’t even know if MP3.com is around anymore so MySpace has kind of taken the place of that. It’s really good if you’re in a band, especially a really unknown band. It’s the fastest way to get your music heard.
Meg: But do you think that sometimes it gives bands credibility before they’ve actually done anything. Obviously you want to share music but all of a sudden bands are blowing up or have this huge fan base and they haven’t even played a live show or struggled through anything.
Tom: There’s something to be said that it’s so important for new bands to go on the road and really see what it is to struggle for your art. It’s a double edged sword I guess. [MySpace] is really just a more efficient version of what we were doing way back then. You know, we had the one website with our music that some people knew about but we were touring most of the time. And now it’s like you can kind of get more accomplished online. The double edged sword part of it is you’re not touring so… you’re not touring—and that’s sort of the point.
Meg: Right… like how much does the struggle of being on the road make you a better band? Versus just throwing your music up online and letting it do the work for you…
Tom: Yeah I mean even just from a technical standpoint playing shows every day is important and just sitting at home watching the numbers on MySpace—you’re not working on your craft. I think that there is something to be said about the bonds that happened under duress at the beginning of a bands lifecycle when now one cares and you’re playing to two people and half your shows are cancelled. There’s power in having that experience.
Meg: Speaking of the “struggle” of live shows…you guys played Coachella a couple years ago and had some… difficulties.
Tom: It was absolutely terrifying. Somehow we ended up on the Mainstage at Coachella and it was like 120 degrees in the desert.
Meg: A friend of mine was there. She said it looked like Geoff was dying…
Tom: He was. He was coughing and spitting up blood. It was at the end of a really grueling tour cycle. It basically felt like we fell apart in front of 80,000 people. But you know, that’s part of it. Sometimes you play your worst show ever in front of tons of people. You just gotta roll with the punches.
Meg: Would you go back? Or was that sort of a one-off Coachella experience?
Tom: Well I don’t really know that we’d be invited back. It’s pretty much an invite only. Actually Minus the Bear jumped off our tour to go play Coachella. They flew out, played, and flew back all within a matter of like a day and a half. So I don’t know. Maybe sometime in the future we’d do it again. I think it’d be fun to get a second chance.
Meg: One more time…
Tom: Yeah like, “one more chance… pleeease?”
Meg: Do you like playing big festivals or do you prefer your own tour?
Tom: Well… it depends.
Meg: It kind of throws you into the mix of being one of like forty-five bands that are playing.
Tom: Yeah… I mean I guess our own show is always more desirable. You know playing at night in a club where there’s sort of a… well there’s literally a roof on the energy and it keeps it really contained and intense. But the thing that’s cool about outdoor festivals, especially one with tons of bands, is that everyone is exposed to sooo many different types of music that they wouldn’t normally be exposed to. I mean you play shorter sets and usually outdoor sound can be a little wacky at times but if it’s well run it can be really fun.
Meg: Who are some of your favorite bands you don’t mind sharing the bill with?
Tom: Actually right now I have a new favorite. We’re touring with mewithoutYou. They’re incredible. No one else sounds like them and it’s really refreshing to get to see them play every night. It’s something more than a fashion show.
Meg: I was just going to bring that up… Is music getting way to gimmicky for you right now?
Tom: Well it’s not even just gimmicky, it’s just so same-samey. We all did it when we were growing up. We wanted to play music like our favorite bands. So many kids’ favorite bands right now are “screamo” which has a really limiting set of rules you have to follow if you want to write in that genre. It’s not hard to write screamo songs these days. I mean the whole term is kind of silly anyway but modern screamo is really just pop music with arbitrary screaming in it and so when you’re young and starting up a band nine times out of ten you’re going to play what’s easiest to play. So I think there are a lot of young bands that are just sort of mimicking their favorite bands. I’m hoping kids sort of get pissed about it and start reacting to it, that the underground will start pushing and branching out into different creative areas. Stop trying to just be the next big thing.
Meg: Stop being so concerned with their career and more about the music itself…
Tom: Exactly. So many young bands are caught up in the career side because you can be in a band and sort of make a living out of it or at least become popular if you stick to a formula. At some point, someone is going to come along and start changing things again… I’m sort of waiting for that.
Meg: Who are some local New Jersey bands that you’re into right now—listening to, watching out for?
Tom: I’m really excited that Saves the Day put out another record. I don’t know how many of them actually live in Jersey anymore but they were sort of at the forefront of underground New Jersey bands I guess blowing up or reaching a broader audience. Right when we made the Understanding in a Car Crash video we went on tour with them and they were playing to 2,000 people a night—we hadn’t played to more than 300 at the time. So it was terrifying but so exciting. They’ve just sort of been plugging away for the past bunch of years and they’re putting out a really great record now that I hope people will recognize.
Meg: What about Paulson that’s opening for you tonight… how’s you guys pick them up?
Tom: Yeah you know it’s funny. A couple of the guys in the band are fans of them. I’d heard their name a bunch but hadn’t had a chance to listen to their music until recently. It’s really cool. I mean they’re definitely one of the only bands that have kind of carried the torch of New Brunswick and New Jersey basement shows. It started off with Bouncing Souls and Lifetime and we were part of this community in New Brunswick putting on basement shows trying to carry the torch of the bands that came before us. Then when we went on tour we didn’t go back to New Brunswick for a couple of years and I didn’t hear anything about my friends’ bands that were still playing or anything like that. It kind of seemed like New Brunswick had gone silent for a while. Paulson is one of the first bands I heard about that are sort of keeping the tradition going. I give them a lot of respect for that. Exciting to know that there are still bands doing it.
Meg: So Amanda Tannen from Stellastarr* did vocals on one of your tracks… how’d that happen?
Tom: She’s actually Andrew’s girlfriend, he met her a couple years ago. We were all big fans of her band. There was this sing-a-long choir part that we had all done vocals for… it just sounded like a bunch of dudes hanging out. It was a little too much testosterone. I mean we’re not exactly the most testosterone driven guys by any means but we just needed a more feminine element so we could include women in the theme of the song.
Meg: Is there anyone else you’d like to work with?
Tom: Actually Dave Fridmann’s wife Mary did vocals on “We Will Overcome” along with Mandy and it turned out cool. I had an ex-girlfriend do vocals on “War All the Time”. I mean also on the record War All the Time we worked with Gretta from Cursive and Jonah from Onelinedrawing. We had some ideas for A City by the Light Divided… guest appearances. But the biggest project we did with guests we actually didn’t get to finish. It was this big eight minute long song with all these other bands… we’re hoping to release it as an EP.
Meg: You head over to the U.K soon… excited?
Tom: It’s interesting. I mean it was really romantic and great the first time we went. I had never been out of the country until we went on tour in the U.K. The kids are really cool over there, the shows are fun. When we first went over there we had sort of built up some momentum in the States and over there we actually got to experience being a young band again… playing really small shows and having our name be just a word of mouth thing. It was cool to kind of rekindle that spirit for a few shows. I don’t know. I’m kind of tall and everything over there is just… everything I’d try to lean on like in a van or whatever it is… my comfort zone was just unattainable. Everything is just shaped a fraction the wrong way so you just can’t get comfortable.
Meg: Yeah I just spent three months there and you’d see tall guys trying to stand on the tube…
Tom: And they’re all hunched over.
Meg: Yeah trying to pretend it’s not awkward.
Tom: Exactly.
Meg: Is that a rendition of the tube map in the CD jacket?
Tom: Yeah we tried. We wanted to sort of mimic the tube.
Meg: Yeah normally I would’ve had no idea except I was just there for so long… I’m like whipping out my pocket tube map going “Yeah I’m pretty sure that’s the Piccadilly line”.
Tom: Ha that’s awesome. We got in trouble actually… well warned… when we were talking to the artist, Louis, over at Island Records. We said we wanted to do a version of the tube map in the CD as the track listing and I think he might’ve just used the exact map. I guess because of security reasons they said we couldn’t use it so we modified it a little.
Meg: Is London one of your favorite cities over there?
Tom: London is pretty rad.
Meg: Favorite venue maybe?
Tom: Trying to think. Is Astoria the big one over there?
Meg: Yeah Astoria, Hammersmith, Brixton…
Tom: Astoria was the really fun show. It’s a huge maze and really dirty. It’s a big room. It was sort of special. When we played that room for the first time and it was sold out it was like “Oh wow, we’re doing really well.” I don’t know where we’re playing when we go over this time. There’s this one city, I forget which one, but the venue is a pyramid on the beach and there’s a water park in it. It’s really bizarre but that was a cool town. I wish I could remember. The last time I was there I was really kind of shut down mentally so other than the shows themselves I really didn’t retain much. I was kind of a hermit on that tour.
Meg: OK… so I gathered some random questions from the kids that have been waiting outside since three o’clock this afternoon…
Tom: Oh awesome.
Meg: We kind of already talked about it but do you think the New Brunswick torch has been successfully passed and is being well taken care of? (Scott, 21. Bergenfield)
Tom: I hope someone’s continuing it. I know Paulson and some of their peers are trying. I don’t know what the house is now that’s doing basement shows. When we did it it was super casual. All of our friends had bands and we just wanted to see if we could write songs together and participate in that community in a way other than just going to shows. It was just super supportive—everyone was friends. The beauty of a basement show is that there’s no stage and everyone can just sing along. When we started touring we didn’t know if we would make it out of New Brunswick. We were actually content with the idea that if we couldn’t get out of New Brunswick that was fine because this was all we ever wanted—to play shows with our friends. It was really great… I hope it’s not dead.
Meg: For the new album did you guys do anything to improve your “skills”? (Michael, 17. Bay Head)
Tom: Like nunchuck skills? Bow hunting skills?
Meg: Hahah. Yes. Brilliant.
Tom: Ha yeah. It’s funny. I always get nervous at the thought of taking guitar lessons. At this point I know that I’ve kind of found enough of my own voice that if I started lessons it would only help me but still the idea of investing that time is kind of daunting. We do vocal warm-ups as often as we can. I don’t know. We sort of have our own rhythm so it doesn’t take as much technically to kind of reach our watermark with playing… thankfully. It used to be that if we hadn’t played for a while we were a train wreck. We still have a train wreck show every once in a while but…
Meg: They’re fewer and farther between…
Tom: Yeah. It sort of clicks better these days.
Meg: Are there any hazing rituals you guys engage in? (Scott, 21 Bergenfield)
Tom: Oh man. There is a hazing ritual everyday for every one of us. It really is like living with five of your brothers so everybody picks on everybody. There’s no room for thin skin in this band. I try to avoid it as much as possible, railing on anyone else too much but we all get sucked into it. We get hurt feelings all the time… it’s all very stupid and adolescent but, you know, it’s part of being in a band I guess.
Meg: Ok to finish off… a few random favorites…
Tom: Cool cool.
Meg: Song to rock out to… throw on, crank up.
Tom: Right now it’s “1979” by mewithoutYou.
Meg: TV show.
Tom: Oh god. I know there’s one. A lot of House Hunters.
Meg: Seriously? …because I am slightly obsessed. I just watched a really good international one last night.
Tom: Oh I watch it all the time. At some point we have to start becoming adults and for the last couple of years that’s about all I can watch.
Meg: House Hunters and the Food Network.
Tom: Ha. Totally.
Meg: Favorite NJ diner?
Tom: Ooh wow. I haven’t been to a good Jersey diner in a long time. It used to be the Time to Eat in Bridgewater with the clock that looks like he’s standing in pee. It’s supposed to be like a shadow but it’s just an outline and looks like he peed himself.
Meg: Niiice. Ok… Song to cry to…
Tom: Ooooh.
Meg: Come on. Show your vulnerable side.
Tom: That would be Miles Davis “Blue in Green”… or “Green in Blue”… might want to fact check that one… off of Kind of Blue.
[it’s “Blue in Green” for the record]
Meg: Best music magazine.
Tom: Alternative Press. I mean there format has changed over the years but they always do a really good job of keeping their finger on the pulse of things.
Meg: OK last one… favorite U.S. city.
Tom: Wilmington, North Carolina.
Meg: Reason?
Tom: I recently moved there. I grew up there for a while. It’s the only other place outside of Jersey that I could imagine myself living… except for maybe Auckland, New Zealand. So yeah… it’s sort of winning the American race.
For more official information on Thursday, please log onto:
http://www.thursday.net/
http://www.myspace.com/thursday
|
