Interview with Communique - Podcast 17

Hey, this is Ryan from Communique, and you are listening to Sound Scene Revolution.

Thanks for tuning in to Sound Scene Revolution this week. My name is Rich, and this week we got to sit down with a very special hometown show with Communique. Some of you may know them formally as American Steel. They have two albums, or an EP and an LP out. One is the EP The Crescent Room, and the LP is Poison Arrows. Both of them are available on the lookout. Yep, we got to sit down with the boys in the back room at the bottom of the hill, and that is just as glamorous as it sounds. And we got to talk to them about touring and the label and switching bands and how the whole thing happened. So it's a lot of fun, and they're really good guys. And plus, if you listen to this interview, you get to find out the meaning of the word poosurp.

I'm not making that up. I think they made it up, actually. Anyhow, so before we jump into the interview with the boys, we have a song off of their LP called Poison Arrows, available on the lookout. We're going to play the first track off the album called The Best Lies. So check it out, and then listen to the interview.

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I'm Rich, and I'm Rich, and this week we are sitting down with the guys from Communique. If you guys can all say hello. Hello. All right, we got one hello. You just looked at me like I was... I was waiting for him. Oh. Hi. I don't know how to say this. How's it going? Okay, I just... Hello, I'm Rory for whoever's transcribing this. That'll be me. There's no transcribing. Oh, I'll be... I will transcribe it eventually, hopefully. But all right, so yeah, if you can just introduce yourself, say what you do in the band, and I don't know, a weird fact about yourself. My name is John. I play bass, and actually my weird fact is today is my 30th birthday, which is kind of scary. Yeah. A little scared on that? Yeah. It's all right.

Ryan turned 31st, so... Oh, there you go. He got manuted first. No, it's Logan's run. Logan's run, yeah. I'm Ryan, I play guitar, I sing sometimes, I got no facts for you. All right. No facts. All right. I'm Rory, I sing and play guitar, and I am a Taurus. Ooh. My favorite color is green. We did favorite color once. Oh, my daddy! All right, so I guess real quick, if I can just get someone, anyone, to give a brief history of the band, how you guys got started, and how you kind of ended up where you guys are. So, any takers? Yeah, sure. A lot of us played in a band for many years, more of a punk rock band called American Steel. The exact member changes and so on are a little convoluted and uninteresting, but basically at some point we decided to end that band, we'd had a good run, and we felt like playing music together still, so we just started recording some new songs that were a little different, had pianos, keys.

We liked being a punk band, but some of the stuff we were starting to do was a little outside of what some people might have wanted to hear from us. So, we decided to start a new band, finally decided on a name, and sort of filled in band members around what we then knew we needed, which was a keyboard player, which was new for us. But, yeah, that's about it. So, we've been playing music together, most of us, for the better part of a decade. The three people in this room, right? Better part. Okay. I want to make sure I don't make any assumptions. I was pretty sure, but, alright, that's cool. Next thing I want to go to, because I want to get this out of the way, what's the most frequently asked question you guys probably get, and what's the answer?

Just so we can sidestep that. The most frequently asked question would have to be, what are your influences? But that's just because every band suffers through that question in just about every interview. I think that comes out on everything, and I'm pretty sure it was somewhere on my list. So, if we could just get to that one and sidestep. To be honest, it's a fair question, right? But, I mean, although I think it's sort of, I don't know. I think it's kind of a trap, though, when you ask that, because you can, every listener can make their own determination based on listening to it, like what they think it sounds like. And oftentimes, your influences and inspiration don't sound anything like what you sound like.

So, it's a trap, I think, to make you say one thing and, you know, have people go, no, that's not true.

I'm saying that to sound cool. It's like those emo bands that say their influences are like the Smiths and like the Cure, and it's like... The Beethoven and the Clash. It's funny, because you sound like pop punk. You sound like the Flink 182, and you're like 19, so I'm guessing, you know. They probably have a Smiths record somewhere. They don't have enough. If I would have to say that. They have, yeah, they have the one record, so they're like, I have a Smiths record. It's their cool older sister's record. Yeah, there you go. That's fair enough.

New stuff? Whatever you're playing, it doesn't have to be new. Yeah, I don't know. As for like newish records, I'm still listening to that Arcade Fire record a fair bit. I tend to listen to a lot of old music, so, you know. That's cool. Like a lot of Willie Nelson, Rolling Stones, I don't know. I'm boring. I like old stuff. I don't know. I've been jamming Broken Social Scene a lot lately, and a record that came out maybe four years ago, but I've just been like really getting into in the last half year, but I'm into that band at the moment.

I'm sort of, now that we're finally iTunes-ish and have an iPod, I'm picking up on stuff I've missed through some other people, like various Kraftwerk records. The Tour de France record is awesome. Right on. Um, some older stuff that I've always liked but never owned, uh, Elvis Costello. Yeah. Um, uh, deeper catalogs of bands like The Band. Yeah. Um, all sorts of stuff. I don't really differentiate by, I don't have the collector's mind. Yeah. I don't think many of us do where we differentiate by decades and years and so on, but, uh. Oh, you know the other one? Uh, the Hives record that came out after their like big smash one. Like, I think it's been out for a couple of years. But like, my girlfriend had it.

I just played it. And I thought, I was like, oh, it sounds like the Hives with a little better production than the last record. Then they had this one song that just fucking slammed into me. It was so good. And I was just like, just kept listening to the record and the record's really good. Ryan, I think you would dig it. Yeah. And actually, now that I think about it, an old record that I totally got into is, uh, actually a couple of the big star records who are a band who I always heard about but somehow never listened to. I just got like fantastically into them because I'm really into 70s rock. That's cool. So, anyway. A lot of people like the 70s. Good era. Are you? Yeah. If you want a class. I like the recordings a lot from that era.

So, that's kind of a big part of it for me. Yeah, you know what's funny is like, uh, Kevin Army is a producer who, uh, we had worked with years ago, used to talk about, uh, how everyone made fun of the 70s as not having good music or, uh, like how the 70s was kind of like a, like a dark ages of like rock and roll or popular music. And he pointed out, it was like, pretty much any great record you can think of came out in the 70s with a few exceptions from the 60s and, and 80s. But like, it's, it's actually amazing how many great records that you wouldn't think. Yeah. What are the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the And then, of course, in the 80s, we got Falco.

So. That's huge. I mean, fucking Rockne Amadeus. Let's do this. I feel that evened out between the 80s and the 70s. But, uh, moving on. I want to ask, um, was it hard for you guys? Because you were pretty well established as American Steel. A lot of people knew you guys. Was it difficult to kind of like, you kind of had to know it was going to lose a little bit of audience feel to switch the band and kind of switch up the style was that like a hard choice for you guys to make i think there are sort of two sides to that from my perspective which was one it was difficult in like you know we're six years further down the road and now we're starting from scratch again but on the other hand it was also a really beautiful thing because we were beating our head against the wall getting frustrated with people who like only wanted to hear stuff off the first two american steel records so in that sense it was a total relief of like okay you all can have that band and we're going to do whatever the fuck we want now so i think it was a little bit of both and we actually just sort of i think people thought we were kind of shying away from it when we were starting a new band but we just wanted to make sure it was really cleanly cut so we didn't really talk about it ever we didn't really mention it we just figured out like if people that were into it and would be into us would just sort of find us in their own time and it's totally turned out that way like after like about a year of playing this community we started getting a lot of american steel fans showing up to shows and they're all the ones that like kind of grew with us and like liked us and like us now so we're sort of like well it all worked out like you know like i think the people who still would have preferred like the early more aggressive stuff can still stay away can still play it like we never put out like a you know we never put out like an experimental like jazz record to like really ruin it for all the people who like the the first record you know but maybe we should but no that's still the works you don't want that jazz record just reform is american steel for one jazz record is it ever hard to deal because i'm sure you guys get a lot of requests for that is it ever hard or do you guys just kind of like smile and like shake your heads at it uh we just smile about it now but it's not really that as often as you think because uh all the fans now are just sort of like people who are actually very much like us like you know like they're we're like you know punk rock kids but just punk rock kids that had some ambition to go to college or like learn things or i don't know you know just like i don't think that makes you punk rock if you go to college i guess not i don't know thinking man's punk rock i don't know i don't know um maybe one day though i don't know to college yeah milo went to college milo went to college and now makes what is he's uh astrophysics some biochemist biochemist yeah phd so is dan yemen though so that'll show you anyhow enough of that um do you guys when you went into the studio to record um crescent moon ep did you guys or when you were writing it even did you guys take like a different approach you were like we're totally going to go this way or did you just let it develop and it just came out sounding as it did from like previous works sorry a lot of what we decided to do kind of was in the studio like we we just recorded it ourselves so that was different um we were always active but um ryan's a good sound engineer and he he's an engineer at all and uh we all knew our way around enough to sort of just do it and we didn't have a lot we didn't really have any money and we just sort of had a bunch of like 18 hour days in this little cramped studio but we just sort of i'd be taking a nap at like four in the morning while john was recording rory singing and it's funny as i pulled i pulled out this uh this analog synthesizer uh this role in like kind of the last day i think because i had this idea for a synth line and we had never done that before we and uh i thought it sounded cool and uh ryan didn't freak out so it kind of it kind of worked so uh and then that's kind of how i think we just got involved with synthesizers and i liked it and i was like i'll do a lot more of these on the next record so initially you guys weren't planning on having a synth that just kind of happened it was an idea in my head for some songs but like there's some songs that just sound like almost piano rock like uh anabelle or something like that and it's like well you had definitely been talking about getting keys i remember i mean that was sort of one of the frustrations around that time was we were writing these songs and he had keyboard parts in his head or piano or b3 parts you know not necessarily synth but uh and we didn't have anybody to fucking play them you know and so we finally you know just started doing it in the studio and it was like oh okay that's what that's gonna sound like you know but i think that record was really i mean it was really loose and like it just it happened and i think it was kind of spontaneous and i don't for i think that's actually one of the reasons why i really love that record is like it's six somewhat disparate songs with lots of weird sounds from things we were doing wrong and like it's just kind of cool whenever you can catch you know just more the attitude of a whole song than even the perfect sound i think that's pretty good so not enough bands do that um one of the things that kind of caught me is my first listened through poison arrow um i kind of or poison arrows i caught it it was very upbeat and kind of like poppy almost and then you start reading through the lyrics and there's some really dark shit in there like the first one that comes to mind is like ouija me and it's a really dark song now is it intentional that like they come off as like really light-hearted almost until you like read the lyrics or is it just kind of again how it develops it's not meant to like trick anybody i've read i've read things where people are like they tricked me you know i was bobbing my head and singing along and it was about suicide or something like that i was like but i i don't know like we've always had pretty dark subject matter i think that's sort of our personalities in a way but we also i don't know uh that's that song in particular has got a little bit of humor in it too it's not it's not it's not that over the top you know it's a little tongue-in-cheek but um i think it's because it fits our personality we like we like uh writing catchy music and and like uh um and i think we also have those dark thoughts and so it's sort of like it doesn't seem strange to me like you're like it's kind of music i like it's kind of thoughts and ideas we have so i think it makes sense but people have only commented on that before i don't know and it's you know what the hell it's like it doesn't have to sound like bella lugosi's dead just because you're writing you know like a fucking a bum out song you don't have to be like i'm dead i'm dead yeah i like that but i don't know if we need to do it it's yeah that would be coming from like an acting approach like what's my uh motivation here like here's what's the theme of the song and then i'll perform it in that way you know it's sort of not really the way it worked not the way it works for us i don't know but so you guys aren't gonna start wearing mascara and makeup and all that i used to just for fun but back then it was mostly you know just you know putting putting the glam on a little bit you know you know i'm not i'm not against like the whole i'm not against like goth things like i kind of got a gothy side to myself but i just once once the like bats and goblins come into it i'm sort of like you know like i'm sort of out the door at that point i'm like yeah all right i like halloween too oh dude back come from like the sort of more existential sort of nihilistic goth or something i don't know kill everyone that's good that's that'll be the soundbite that we use that'll be uh how we promote this interview yeah rory says kill everyone tune in and find out why um so the next kind of question is are you guys working on any new material or recording anything new we officially have an ass load of new material ass load does that break down numerically one metric ass load yeah exactly we've uh we've demoed around 10 songs so far and we have a bunch more that are sort of waiting in the wings for either studio time or just time in general to materialize that's cool now i was i can't remember if i read it or somebody told me that your next record is probably not going to be coming out on lookout that not going to be doing it on lookout is there a particular reason lookout is no longer in the business of putting out new records oh they're just doing catalog work exactly so we owed them another record in our contract and uh we're we're actually we're actually going to start recording it last fall but that's when uh green day pulled the records and they had all the other they kind of restructured themselves so um it's good and bad we have like a new opportunity and actually the the extra time we've get we've been given i think has helped the songs although it's made us a bit anxious a little panicky about like when another record will come out but um uh we have um very uh we have professional people looking for a label right now so it's out of our hands while we sit at home bored yeah i'm ready to get on the road try to write the whole record yeah well i gotta imagine someone and fucking i'll put it out give me give me the demos i'll master it put it out for you five hundred thousand dollars yeah just for you can you can see what i can do on that you guys all have kidneys that you can donate we can we can generate this thank god for bisemetry you know guys you could get like probably 15 bucks a kidney right we're on our way um no that's cool is that going to affect any of your back catalog any like your ep and the lp or any of the american steel work as long as lookout still putting them out they'll be on lookout so that's cool hopefully it won't affect it but ideally in an ideal situation all right so uh we're going to take a little break here in the middle of the interview give you some more music from the guys in communique and let you get back to uh kind of stasis homeostasis there so we're going to play uh track two off of their album poison arrows or we're going to play they're not all going to be in order i just like one and two a lot so you guys get to hear those because the show is basically what i like um we're going to play track two off poison arrows it's called evaporate and then when we get back to the interview we're going to talk to the boys about touring and what you do on tour and how many bands they have ruthlessly massacred over their 10 plus years of playing music so be sure to check that out but before that i'm going to play evaporate right here on sound scene revolution

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what happens yeah i'll wait and see um so i've a lot of stuff i've read about you guys have actually played with some pretty good-sized bands i mean first one that comes to mind is you guys recently came off a tour with uh tegan and sarah kind of shifting gears um is there like one band that you've played with in particular that you've really liked or one band in particular that you would really want to play with that would like kind of make your day i think we could probably think of some bands you'd like to play with but the other ones we have played with uh tegan and sarah it was great um we did ted leo that was a great tour against me we've toured a couple times with that was great um who else am i leaving out uh minus the bear um these arms are snakes they're also good friends of ours um we did a tour with uh taking back sunday and uh my chemical romance which was bigger bands yeah they're great guys love to tour with them again i don't know there's uh i would tour again with any of the bands we've been on tours pretty much yeah it's funny because i think like kids look at it from a perspective of like oh you want to go on tour with the band whose music you love the most and not to take away anything from any of those bands music because i love a lot of it but it's like for me it's so much more about the people and like all of those bands have really awesome people but there's nothing more miserable than being on tour with people where you the bands just don't like each other it's like really unpleasant it hasn't happened to us really very often sugarcoat we love wonderful people i wasn't referencing anything i said i was actually totally tuning you out oh okay well that's good that's pretty much the history of our band actually you're gonna keep talking i'm gonna keep talking he's gonna sort of you know look away that's cool has there been any like like what's i mean we were talking a little earlier about your guys stuff breaking down like the load iron crap has there ever been like your worst experience on a tour or anything there's been so many that we couldn't even begin to describe it they're all very like mundane they're very mundane and municipal problems we have that we just sort of correct and it's sort of amazing at this point like yeah mostly transmissions that's they involve money yeah but at this point we're still used to transmissions blowing up that we just sort of like give each other the transmission look and it's like oh okay well we're out another three thousand dollars awesome okay cool yeah okay i'm gonna say yes so we can keep this going five minutes no you're right so what how many vans have you guys been through vans yeah because you're talking including american steel um yes this is our fifth fifth oh my god i think but ask us about transmissions yeah holy crap how do you go transmissions in el paso that's two transmissions in one city how many how do you go through so many transmissions uh a combination that's a good question bad luck yeah towing gear if you don't have enough money in the first place you can't get a quality vehicle which then you know it's kind of like the uh you got to get eddie van halen to make a killer video you can't get eddie van halen unless i think if you i think if you ask any band that's just the one thing you don't like talk about or jinx you don't talk about how well the van is running while you're in the van or how you might be concerned about a certain noise that the van's making i mean maybe that's a little uh superstitious of me but that's the one superstition i have maybe i think if there's anything that makes you more superstitious than being a baseball player it's being in a rock and roll band i would have to imagine we do wear the same shirt every night but that's not because we're superstitious about it and we do not shave but you know that's they're unrelated very cool so like most of the time when you're on the road you're just looking straight ahead like ignoring the pinging noise coming out of the bag did you turn up the nintendo yeah it's cool it's just my fucking hearing loss yes it's not the pinging of the transmission but yeah how do you guys uh kill time on the road because i imagine you guys do a lot of driving is there anything in particular you just like sit around sleep first sleep is a good way to kill time which when you when we're driving you mean yeah sleep uh if there's a video game or a dvd player in a van that's the way to go laptops have been in the great leap forward in our entertainment abilities but we even crafted special things uh to um so i totally got distracted about it weird code um yeah uh yeah it's reading but you know pretty much uh drinking is one uh that's one that i've gotten recently uh just i've actually had some pretty fun nights when we had really long drive on like a drive day where there's no show and it's like we have to go from like san francisco to like denver or something like that and be like uh well we're gonna just gonna drive through nevada the whole day today so uh once the sun looks like it's starting to think about going down i'm getting a tall boy at the next gas station and everyone you know when everyone else does too and they have a little party in the van it's actually kind of fun you end up with like me chasing sheep at seven in the morning urinating on the side of the freeway how else are our horrendous inside jokes and like new terms that we coin going to be born other other than being drunk on tall boys in the back of the hand my favorite by the way being um on the road when you get a hotel or actually pretty pretty much anywhere when your friend goes to the bathroom in front of you and takes a shit and they know you have to use the bathroom really bad that's poo-serping someone and it's totally cruel and it's no friends not poo-serp friends this is the level that things get down to there's a lot of yeah actually people talk to pretty much any band when bands bump into each other on the road it like oh yeah poo-serp dude what have you been doing for the last couple months or whatever catch up for about five minutes and then it's pretty much poo talk for about i don't know why like you get us in any any other situation there's like intelligent people we'll sit down and talk about anything else but on tour it's very fifth grade boys talking about it's universal fecal matter all right i think we're gonna on that note we're gonna start wrapping things up but first there's one thing uh it kind of jumped out at me it's kind of been bugging me on a lot of the american steel work i've noticed uh rory's name is spelled r-u-a-i-r-i and a lot of the uh communicate work i believe it's spelled r-o-r-y is there a particular reason for that or uh yeah we were just difficult like just being difficult like i think there's only one rory who's me white man well when we first started it was like we're not gonna put photos of ourselves or anything and we're going we're never gonna put our last names in there and i just took it a step further and went well i'm just gonna use if i'm gonna use my first name i'm gonna spell it in gaelic and uh so that's why i did it that way i got stuck that way and once everyone had figured out how to spell it and pronounce it i uh i changed it back that's awesome because i was looking at i was going through all the stuff and i looked i'm like and even on the lookout website it's spelled differently so it's good good to clear that one up all right thanks and um before we uh finalize this is there any plugs you guys want to put out websites tours stuff people can do check you out at well uh there's www.radiocommunique.com one word um and then there's always that um evil website that rupert murdoch owns where you can just do that and backslash our name and uh you'll find us i i we're we're there we're there solely because so many people use it and it would be too it would be too difficult to not use it but i don't feel good about it you don't pay for it yeah yeah that's true this bulletin totally said we'd have to go to our fox news website and check out all right cool well thank you guys a lot um and uh thanks for taking the time to talk to us awesome cheers all right so that wraps up the interview and most of this week's show i hope you guys enjoyed it hope you guys learned something and you walk away a little better person with a little better understanding of yourself or maybe you just enjoyed it and you'd like to send us money either way is cool uh if you guys want to contact us uh suggest bands comment on the interview anything like that you guys can always hit us up at soundscenerevolution at gmail.com you can hit us on our comment boards right here or we have the myspace thing because everybody has the myspace thing and we have to be cool one day we're gonna add really cool backgrounds and pictures of ourselves shirtless with guitars or i don't know whatever really cool people have on myspace anyhow we're gonna wrap up this show with one last track off of communique's lp poison arrows we're gonna play the track strays which is track number seven so we didn't go one two three we won one two seven and uh that'll be it for this week's show so i hope you guys enjoyed it be sure to tune in next week for a brand new interview and lots of really interesting shit right here on uh sound scene revolution

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