By Matt Jarrard
Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s latest release, Buzzard
What are you listening to on the road?
We’re in a bus this time, so it’s different for everybody…there’s not that community car stereo thing, so it’s a lot of Ipods. Personally I’m listening to some Lucinda Williams and a lot of instructional Italian speaking audio book things…not a lot of music so far.
Any specific reason you want to learn Italian?
Uh, not letting my mind go to waste I guess. I like Italian food, Italian movies…I’m sure I’ll give it up in the next two weeks (laughs). You always get a little self conscious about how much time you waste on the van, or bus and think: I should probably put some of that time to use…then that thought usually passes (laughs).
Have you read any thing or seen any films recently that have been especially great?
Yeah, I’ve been reading Tropic of Cancer, and a Neil Young biography, and watched a couple of documentaries, one about John Holmes, and one called God’s Angry Man, and I’ve been watching a lot of The Wire.
Oh, I love The Wire!
It’s pretty much the greatest show ever. I just started season 5, moved pretty quickly through the first three seasons at home and just finished 4 on the bus. I just watched the first two episodes of 5.
Tell me about the album, how has it been received so far?
Surprisingly well, so far. The reactions, reviews and everything seem to be good. I don’t know, it seems to be clicking better than the last record in terms of the reaction we’re getting I guess.
I saw AV Club liked it…
Oh Yeah yeah that was kind of a shitty…like a…a lot of back handed compliments (laughs). I dunno, kind of a double sided positive review. I actually love AV club, I don’t generally agree with a lot of their criticism of movies, but I don’t read a lot of music criticism, I mostly read a lot of film criticism.
Was the recording done a little more live this time? Less over-dubbing and such?
Yeah, we’ve never done much live recording before this record and that had to do with the fact that we had so many people, and that we had some people in the band who were kind of strangely anti-recording that way. I think that by the time we got around to Animal we were pretty aggressively arranging and piecing things together in the studio. This time around the basic guiding principal of the thing was that nothing was put on the record until the performance of the band playing in a room was to the level it should be. Before we would try to fix those things in other ways, by maybe adding instruments or working on the arrangement, but not necessarily playing the fucking thing until it felt like 4 or 5 people played it well in a room.
I think both the album title and cover artwork are very striking, tell me about the origins of both.
Um, yeah….I think the name came up like most things I come up with; it’s just something that popped into my head, but later I think about where it came from. I think it’s probably just a play on Animal, I wasn’t trying to c
ome up with something that would be a response, or the next thing, but I think that was pretty dominant in my mind for well over a year…my feelings about how Animal went down, so Buzzard to me was maybe a comment on that. The photo, was just a photograph that my friend Stephanie Bassos who is a really great photographer in Chicago took. She has a bunch of photos, a few of which we had been bouncing around as possibilities. We knew we wanted to do the cover with a photograph and not do paintings again. I dunno, I think it just came down to the fact that I liked the image a lot but I also thought it was pretty noticeable if you walked into somewhere and saw it, I think it’s a record I would pick up, if I saw it out, and turn it over and see what it was about I guess.
So I understand you’re a dad now, right?
I am, yeah.
Congratulations.
Thanks.
What’s that like?
It’s great, ummm, I have an 10 month old daughter, it’s time consuming, it’s all the clichés…she’s a really awesome kid. It’s nice, I think it’s changed my work ethic, it’s made us tour in very different ways, we do everything we do in very different ways because everything has a different weight to it when you have a kid who you know for the next 18, 20 years, you’re going to be responsible for that child, and you can’t really fuck off as much anymore in terms of the business side of music. You have to bury your impulses to blow shit up, which I have a lot of.
Have you started writing the next record?
Yes, I’d say we have about half of it written, I’m sure it will change, depending on how long it takes us to record. We’d like to have another record done a lot quicker than we’d been able to in the past.
Can you describe the new songs?
Yeah, the ones I have, I guess are kind of breezy, Boston in the 90’s era kinds of pop music. A little less grindy and dark, maybe a little more like bicycle riding…I don’t know if that makes any sense. It’s like a nice light fall record, but I’m sure whenever I start doing that it will end of being dark and morbid…but I’d really like to make a record like that eventually. I almost feel like its the Peaches, if the Peaches were snotty brat, fucks. A little more angry I guess. But I’m sure it will sound nothing like that.
I was always impressed with how much you interact with your fans through the message board and with limited edition releases, pre-tour videos, offering advance listening parties of demos, etc. Is that something you learned from somewhere? Or does it come naturally to you and the band?
I think it’s a little bit of both. There’s periods where I don’t feel like interacting at all in that way. There was a little less of sharing music from this record because I was a little more unsure of what I was doing and I needed it to be private for longer. The times when we do that stuff, it’s based on the kind of interaction I enjoyed with the bands I liked when I was younger. There was this kind of fan club mentality in the 90s. I always liked a band kind of being like a club house where you weren’t just going to buy the record on the Tuesday it came out, but you got more of an experience that lasts, by offering stuff that is a little more interactive for the people that really care about it.
Is Tiny Vampire Robot a metaphor?
Tiny Vampire Robot is about not wanting to write music anymore after Animal. Robot…vampire…they’re pretty opposite ends of the creature spectrum, so you can probably deduce what that’s about, it’s not too complicated.
Have you heard the new Weezer album?
I have, yeah.
What do you think?
Ummm, I like the idea of it a lot. I like the song called Run Away, it’s a pretty cool song, Unspoken is a good song. It’s a pretty mixed bag, like most of the stuff they’ve done recently. But of the part of the mixed bag that I like, I’d say I like a little bit better than what’s been on the last few records at least.
Have you heard about the Pinkerton/Blue Album tour they’re talking about doing?
Yeah, I did hear about that. I can’t wait! I’ll be there with bells on!
Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s will be at the Drunken Unicorn Saturday, October 9th.
Tickets are still available, The Lonely Forest and Cameron McGill and What Army open.
Margot & the Nuclear So & So’s – Lunatic Lunatic Lunatic
