The Exit

The attitude is totally different. In New York they have a lot of attitude but in Nashville they don’t have a lot of attitude but they have a lot of chops. You will see a lot of bands that suck but everyone in the band are still really good musicians.

Also I just woke up and I’m playing my guitar. I always try to play when I first wake up.

I just knock around on it. We have another album we’ve written but not released yet so I’m just playing with those tunes. There is some silly stuff I’m still trying to learn too.

We just played three Nashville shows with Muse and we’ve had some pretty big crowds. The guitar player from Muse is really fucking amazing so watching him every night is fun. They are a musician’s band so our drummer looks to their drummer and I will look to their guitar player. It’s cool.

We’re going down to Orlando Florida then we have to drive to LA.

Yeah but we have our own gig in LA at The Wiltern so that’s cool.

A lot of Jeff’s lyrics are pretty post 9/11. Jeff’s lyrics talk about the anxiety from that because it was stressful touring during that time then coming home to New York. It’s basically just about love and politics.

The song, Don’t Push, was written three days before we went into the studio because we needed a solid song. We went to go see the Bad Brains with our producer Ron [Saint-Germain] who produced the Bad Brains album Eye Against Eye. When we went into preproduction with him he was giving us shit about our formats so we figured we needed one last awesome number. So I wrote Don’t Push and that became the first track on the album. We put that one together really quick and it came out real fresh.

Yeah we get it together.

Yeah, also at this point it’s a necessary component. The best way for our unit to work is for everyone to contribute. To me it’s all about harmony.

It was pretty stressful and really difficult. The day we went into the studio I was in the hospital because I came down with the flu. I had a 104 fever and I was sweating through the sheets. For the first four days in the studio I wasn’t there so the band recorded a lot of music with me not there. Ron was a stressed out cat because he normally makes records for half a million dollars. But we had like 1/25 of a million dollars. That was a lot of money for us but for him it was like nothing. He was yelling at me on the phone telling me to get the hell down there. I was like, yo man I can’t move. He kept telling me we couldn’t push it back. Since we’re such a tight band I told him to have everyone else lay their stuff down. That was probably a decision I shouldn’t have had to make. But then later when I came in, it was difficult because there were all these spaces on the tracks. Where normally I would just do one guitar I had to record different harmonies of the same parts to fill it in. It became this really tedious thing but it was also cool because it was kind of like painting with music. It was difficult but I learned a lot from it. Even though I have certain qualms about the record it’s solid and people are into it.

We’re trying to figure it out since we recorded it in our practice space it’s more like a demo album. It’s starting to sound really good. We recorded it right after Home for an Island and we’re just starting to put vocals on it. We’re like that, so we will work hard and just put out some more music. We played our first song from it the other night and it was cool. The 700 people at the show were down with it.

Gunnar brings the reggae, Jeff brings the reggae bass and I bring the reggae guitar. We’ll get all tribal with it. That’s what’s cool about being in New York because we’ve developed this urban sound. A lot of hip-hop heads, like Keziah Jones, came into the studio while we were playing and told us we sounded funky.

When I was a kid I wasn’t walking around with dreads or anything but I was always into reggae. I had this one Rastafarian babysitter named Linda that was always taking me to see her boyfriend’s reggae band named Lion’s Den. Also Gunnar and I used to play in ska band so we always dug those grooves.

It was Fat Gat Billiards Hall with a hardcore band called De La Hoya. That was three and a half years ago.

They are a really cool label that works hard. They aren’t about any kind of scene but are just into signing good music.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck