Let's get this out of the way, up front -- She Wants Revenge is not the second coming of Ian Curtis, the band is nothing like Interpol, and the titular "She" is not based on an actual person who Wants Revenge on Justin Warfield and Adam Bravin. Is this really everything music journalists could possibly dig up about a band that keeps no secrets? I talked to Adam just days after the band's sophomore effort, This is Forever, arrived in stores. She Wants Revenge isn't just promoting a new album, though. The band is also trying to start a conversation about a lot of older ones -- none of which, for the hundredth time, are by Joy Division.
Jay Hathaway: You guys have been busy! Adam Bravin: Very. JH: Yeah. New album out. How does that feel? AB: Amazing! It's nice when your friends hear it, and typically your friends are going to tell you that they like it either way. But it's great for it to finally come out. We've been waiting to hear what kids think about it, and we're happy for it to be out now. JH: You worked on the first record for such a long time before it was released, it was sort of a long process. Was it hard to put out the second one right away? AB: We had been on tour for so long. We are two guys that have pretty much always had access to a studio at any given time, so this is the longest I've ever gone without having that. We had so many ideas, and so much we wanted to get out, by the time we finally did get into the studio, we were ready to go. It really didn't take that long. It was ... I think, on and off, it took like four months to finish it. JH: Wow, that's amazing. Usually unless you have these bands where the label's giving them a lot of pressure to put something new out really fast, it can take two or three years to finish the next album. AB: Well, we wanted to get it out as soon as possible. As far as the label's concerned, they didn't even know we were recording. We just went in and recorded. We don't feel any kind of pressure from the label because we don't think that way, we just go in and make music for ourselves and then turn it in. They didn't even know we were recording until we turned it in. They were like, "Wow." JH: You probably get a better album that way, too, when you're free to do what you want. AB: Easier for us to do our own thing, and just continue doing what we do. We actually wanted to start working on the third record before we went on tour. But Justin just had a baby, so that doesn't leave a lot of time. JH: Oh yeah? That can definitely take a lot of time. That's going to be kind of tough. AB: Right? Yeah. JH: Were you looking forward to getting back out there, or would you rather be recording? AB: I couldn't wait to get back out! They're both amazing processes. It's great being in the studio, being able to record and go through that whole thing. It's just as amazing being out on the road, playing our music for all the people who want to come hear it. Especially new stuff. We toured the first two years, and we only had one album worth of material to really play. So it's great going back out there not only playing the old stuff, but also having all the new stuff available for us to play, it's just really fun. JH: Yeah. How many dates have you played so far? AB: I think we've played six shows. JH: Great. Good reactions so far? Good crowds? AB: It's been great considering most of our set is new stuff. You know, it's difficult when you go to a show and the CD just came out. A lot of people don't really know the new stuff. People have been reacting very very positively to dealing with a whole show of unfamiliar music, which sometimes can be a little rough. JH: You know, I was actually out bowling the other night, and True Romance came on at the bowling alley. Everyone started nodding, like "Hey, what is this? This is pretty good." The bowling crowd is maybe not your biggest fan base, but it played pretty well there. AB: That's pretty cool. That's awesome. JH: Since you've started out, you've met some pretty interesting bands. What was it like meeting Depeche Mode? AB: Right. Well, Justin goes way back with Martin [Gore, of Depeche Mode]. They've known each other, I think eight or nine years. JH: Oh, wow! Ok. AB: So I bumped into Martin right after our first record came out, at some club, that I think I was DJing at. So I called Justin and said, "Yo, your boy Martin's here, you should roll over." So Justin came down, he brought a copy of our album - I think our album had been out maybe a month or two - and he gave a copy to Martin. Cut to a year later, we hear that at every after party they have after their shows that they're playing our record. And then shortly after that, we got a call saying that they wanted us to come out on tour with them. Which was a dream come true, you know. Favorite band ever asking you to come tour with them. Very overwhelming and very surreal, it was the best time ever. JH: And you know, you guys get a lot of Joy Division comparisons - AB: [Groans] JH: - which I'm sure you're pretty sick of by now. I always heard more Depeche Mode in Justin's vocals. I feel like that's what the influence on his vocal style probably was. Maybe Ian Curtis to some extent, but what I really heard was Depeche Mode. AB: You know, I've known Justin since we were kids, and we never listened to Joy Division until real late in life. When I listen to him since, I hear more like Bowie and Gahan. I understand why people say that, it's because of the baritone register and because of some songs that he's kind of monotone on. People started saying Joy Division really early on, and people always want to compare us to something. I guess there's not really that many things you can compare our music to. JH: Exactly, yeah. AB: You've got to put it into some kind of box, and people try to do that. But we're really honest about our influences. We were way more into New Order than Joy Division. I think back in the day when we were growing up, you might have heard "Love Will Tear Us Apart", if you were lucky. It's not like they were playing "Transmission" on the radio. JH: Right. And, I mean, New Order is more of the dance side of that. Which is something you guys do as well, so that makes more sense than Joy Division. AB: Yeah. JH: Maybe the kids who listen to She Wants Revenge now are just discovering Joy Division themselves, and they're thinking, "This is really cool. This is a good name we can drop." AB: Honestly, it's not even the kids. The kids never say that. It's always some journalist that says it. JH: Oh yeah? AB: It's just the journalists being lazy. Typically, when the first album was out, they would hear "Tear You Apart" and wouldn't really investigate any further into the album. So their reference is that one song, and that's the one song I understand people being lazy and comparing it to Joy Division, but if you really listen to the record, you're not going to hear that. Nobody can sound like Joy Division! If they really wanted to say what they meant, they'd say Ian Curtis. JH: That's a really good point. AB: Yeah, that whole Joy Division thing I think just came down to journalists being lazy. JH: I went back through a bunch of your interviews, and they've really just asked you the same five questions. Say something about Joy Division. Say something about Interpol. AB: And who is She and why does She Want Revenge? I mean, we got to the point where we had six questions that if somebody asked them, we would end the interview. At that point, a year and a half later, if you really can't come up with your own questions, and you can't answer that stuff on Google yourself - journalists are typically very uncreative. You understand at the beginning of the album cycle that people ask you the dumb questions just because they have to - people want to know where you're from and how did you come up with the name of the band, all that kind of stuff. But come on, after a year and half, you'd expect that people would come up with more interesting and creative questions than "Who is She and why does She Want Revenge?" JH: Last time you talked to SuicideGirls, you mentioned you had this interesting relationship with a girl you met through the site. And She Wants Revenge got popular through MySpace. I was thinking about how these sites have really changed what relationships are like for people now. Is that something you guys have thought about at all when you're writing? AB: Honestly, I can't really speak for Justin as far as the lyrics are concerned. He writes them all, and we never really talk about the reasons why we do stuff - lyrics, or video concepts or artwork. It's much more interesting for us when people just interpret them for themselves. JH: So you get people reading a lot into the lyrics and coming up with these elaborate back stories behind the songs? AB: Yeah. We love that, it's great. People have all kinds of crazy ideas about what they think the lyrics are about. I mean, 99.9% of the time, they're wrong. But it's cool - we're always like, "Well, that's cool that they think the song is about that." JH: It's the kind of stuff that could easily be personal to someone. I think a lot of people hear it and go, "You know, that really sounds like me." AB: Right. We get that a lot. JH: And I think that's interesting, because I'm not necessarily sure you guys are trying to write about normal relationships. A lot of these are damaged situations. AB: Are there really normal relationships? I think the type of things that Justin talks about are more common than people think they are. JH: But if you go back to '50s and '60s pop songs, there was an idea of what a relationship was supposed to like. You had to fit whatever creative message you had into that, in some kind of subversive way. But now you guys can just come out and say it. AB: Absolutely. Thank god! We grew up listening to Depeche and the Cure and the Furs, and the Smiths, and those were all dance-oriented bands, but at the same time, their lyrics were a little bit deeper and more emotional. People could connect to them on an emotional level. Not just men, but women as well. Most of the music out there is made by men for men. There's not a lot of bands that really connect with women. One of the great things about the way Justin writes about relationships is that he's writing as a man to women. And that's something that a lot of girls on our website and on MySpace say that they really appreciate, that he does do that, and not a lot of guys do. JH: Has the makeup of the audience changed this time out? AB: No, it's the same. It's a really crazy audience. It's all young girls, young guys. You get some of the hipsters and some of the, for lack of a better word, goth-looking girls. But then we get a lot of people that grew up with the same stuff we grew up with, and are older, mid-to-late thirties or early forties. We get a really wide variety of people at the shows. The crowds look basically the same as they were last time we came around, as far as diversity of people. JH: What did you do differently on the second record? Did you start out with new goals this time around? AB: A lot of bands make the mistake on the second record of, A) they tend to go a little bit poppier, they've had some type of success, a lot of times they want to go for what some people deem as success, and they make a super-poppy album. Or they go some completely different direction, where they tend make not as a good a record as their first one, and on top of it, they tend to alienate their crowds by doing that. Our only goals were, A) we wanted to make a darker record, and B) we wanted it to be a good record as far as we were concerned. I think we both feel we did. JH: So how would you define success, just out of curiosity? AB: We never thought any of this was going to happen, so success to us is that we make music that we like, and that people out there enjoy what we do. That's success for us, and to add to that we have the opportunity to be on the road, doing what we love. It doesn't get much better than that. Do we want to sell a billion records and make millions of dollars? As far we're concerned, that would be nice. I mean, everybody wants to do that, but that's not how we look at success. We feel like we're successful just being able to be out on the road, or be in the studio, and continue to make music that people want to hear. JH: And if things blew up too much, it might actually get in the way of what you want to do. You'd have a whole new set of obligations. You hear about these big stars who say, "I just want to go back to making records in my basement." AB: No matter what happens for us, we're always going to have the same mentality, of just being two guys - you know, it's like what you said about going back in my basement? We recorded almost the whole first record at our houses. Then we got this record deal, and built a studio with our budget. So, worst case scenario, whatever happens to us, we'll always have our little dream studio that we made. Who knows what's going to happen to us, but let's just say things did blow up - we would still go back to our little room and record music the same way we've always done it. We don't really need much, we just need our little studio and ideas to bounce off each other, and we're fine. We don't feel pressure from the label - like on this record, it was like we never left the studio. We had a great time, and we didn't think about anything other than - well, I thought about coming up with ideas that Justin's going to like. That's really all we ever needed. A couple keyboards, a couple guitars, each other. JH: Talking about all those ideas - you've been asked a lot about how the first single from the last album almost didn't make it onto the record. Did you cut anything this time that you thought was a really close call? AB: Definitely. This time there were definitely a few songs that I would have like to put on there, that we saved for B-sides, imports and that kind of stuff. We recorded probably 35 or 40 songs. We had a little chalkboard in the studio, and we put them all on there and went through them all. I think we made the right decisions as far as what we put on this record. We have a song called "Love to Sleep", and it's like a ballad. I'm a sucker for a ballad. You know, Depeche would always have a really cool ballad. I like listening to whole albums, and I like a little break when it's a dance kind of band. We have a little instrumental piece on this record that kind of slows it down. So, you know, there was a song I would have liked to see on the record, but that'll come out on something else. As far as what we put on this record, I think we chose wisely. JH: Obviously meeting Depeche Mode was absolutely huge, but is there anyone else you'd really like to meet, tour with, even collaborate on a song? AB: As far as She Wants Revenge is concerned? JH: Or you personally. AB: There's a million people I'd want to work with personally. We both produce other stuff individually. I'm working on a record that's going to feature all female vocalists, and most of them are my favorites. As far as collaborating, the three names we came up with that we would like to have on this record, although they didn't work out due to scheduling problems, would be Martin Gore, and we thought about having David Bowie do something with us, and we also would love to do - and I'm sure it'll happen in the future - something with Brian from Placebo. JH: I actually just talked to him right at the end of their summer tour. AB: Justin goes way back with them, I think he appeared on their first record. Those guys are great. When we're all in the same city at the same time and have some time off, I'm sure that's going to happen. JH: Cool. AB: As far as touring, we'd love to tour with the Cure, which may possibly happen soon. The other dream band to tour with would be Bauhaus. We just did a show with the Cure a couple days, and we got to watch them for three hours. It was absolutely amazing. JH: Really not a lot of bands can pull off a solid three hour set anymore. You have to have the material to do it, and you have to really have your shit together. AB: Absolutely! and they've got the catalog, it's not like they couldn't keep going for another hour or two. But three hours is a long time, and you'd think that maybe by the end of the set, you'd get bored or something, but when they came on with their encore, we were like, "Wow, it just gets better!" JH: and it's great to see a band with that much longevity that's still good. I thought Depeche's last album was the best thing they'd done in years, and it made me happy to see that. Do you have a favorite Depeche Mode album? AB: Some Great Reward. That was really the one that I connected with growing up. I mean, I like all of them. I think that was the first one I bought, and then went back to the previous albums after I got into that one. One of those songs was kind of a theme to my first crush. JH: Did you ever own any records when you were a kid that you're now really embarrassed by? AB: No way! I'm not embarrassed about any of the albums I ever had. I like all that stuff. I mean, I still have all those records. I have a huge huge record collection, so a lot of times people come over and they start wandered through my records, and they'll pull something out like, "Bee-Gees Greatest Hits?" And I'm like, "Yeah, the Bee-Gees rule!" JH: The Bee-Gees do rule! AB: They really do. You know, I bought everything for a reason. Whether I liked it then, or like it now, or don't like it now, I liked it at one point, and I don't get embarrassed over that kind of stuff. I like everything. JH: Any new bands you've been listening to, stuff that's come out over the past couple of years? AB: There's a band from Mexico City that I listen to called Subdivision, they're really great. I love the Dears. There's not a lot of new bands I'm really that into. Tough one. I don't really listen to a lot of new music. JH: Are they any that you're aggressively NOT into? (laughs) AB: A lot! I mean, pretty much anything on the radio. I can't get into any of those boy bands that are on the rock side, all of that stuff just makes me want to listen to Satellite. JH: Alright, I guess we have to get going soon, but how about this: since people do always ask you the same handful of questions all the time, what's something they're avoiding that you wish they would ask? AB: Well, people always throw comparisons at us. It's very rare that someone says, "What influenced your first record. What influences what you do in She Wants Revenge?" We want to talk about that. It's music, it's film and it's literature, and nobody ever says anything about literature and film! It would be nice to be able discuss all the other things that influence what we do, rather than just somebody going "So, Joy Division, blah blah blah!"
For more information go to www.shewantsrevenge.com
Jay Hathaway: You guys have been busy! Adam Bravin: Very. JH: Yeah. New album out. How does that feel? AB: Amazing! It's nice when your friends hear it, and typically your friends are going to tell you that they like it either way. But it's great for it to finally come out. We've been waiting to hear what kids think about it, and we're happy for it to be out now. JH: You worked on the first record for such a long time before it was released, it was sort of a long process. Was it hard to put out the second one right away? AB: We had been on tour for so long. We are two guys that have pretty much always had access to a studio at any given time, so this is the longest I've ever gone without having that. We had so many ideas, and so much we wanted to get out, by the time we finally did get into the studio, we were ready to go. It really didn't take that long. It was ... I think, on and off, it took like four months to finish it. JH: Wow, that's amazing. Usually unless you have these bands where the label's giving them a lot of pressure to put something new out really fast, it can take two or three years to finish the next album. AB: Well, we wanted to get it out as soon as possible. As far as the label's concerned, they didn't even know we were recording. We just went in and recorded. We don't feel any kind of pressure from the label because we don't think that way, we just go in and make music for ourselves and then turn it in. They didn't even know we were recording until we turned it in. They were like, "Wow." JH: You probably get a better album that way, too, when you're free to do what you want. AB: Easier for us to do our own thing, and just continue doing what we do. We actually wanted to start working on the third record before we went on tour. But Justin just had a baby, so that doesn't leave a lot of time. JH: Oh yeah? That can definitely take a lot of time. That's going to be kind of tough. AB: Right? Yeah. JH: Were you looking forward to getting back out there, or would you rather be recording? AB: I couldn't wait to get back out! They're both amazing processes. It's great being in the studio, being able to record and go through that whole thing. It's just as amazing being out on the road, playing our music for all the people who want to come hear it. Especially new stuff. We toured the first two years, and we only had one album worth of material to really play. So it's great going back out there not only playing the old stuff, but also having all the new stuff available for us to play, it's just really fun. JH: Yeah. How many dates have you played so far? AB: I think we've played six shows. JH: Great. Good reactions so far? Good crowds? AB: It's been great considering most of our set is new stuff. You know, it's difficult when you go to a show and the CD just came out. A lot of people don't really know the new stuff. People have been reacting very very positively to dealing with a whole show of unfamiliar music, which sometimes can be a little rough. JH: You know, I was actually out bowling the other night, and True Romance came on at the bowling alley. Everyone started nodding, like "Hey, what is this? This is pretty good." The bowling crowd is maybe not your biggest fan base, but it played pretty well there. AB: That's pretty cool. That's awesome. JH: Since you've started out, you've met some pretty interesting bands. What was it like meeting Depeche Mode? AB: Right. Well, Justin goes way back with Martin [Gore, of Depeche Mode]. They've known each other, I think eight or nine years. JH: Oh, wow! Ok. AB: So I bumped into Martin right after our first record came out, at some club, that I think I was DJing at. So I called Justin and said, "Yo, your boy Martin's here, you should roll over." So Justin came down, he brought a copy of our album - I think our album had been out maybe a month or two - and he gave a copy to Martin. Cut to a year later, we hear that at every after party they have after their shows that they're playing our record. And then shortly after that, we got a call saying that they wanted us to come out on tour with them. Which was a dream come true, you know. Favorite band ever asking you to come tour with them. Very overwhelming and very surreal, it was the best time ever. JH: And you know, you guys get a lot of Joy Division comparisons - AB: [Groans] JH: - which I'm sure you're pretty sick of by now. I always heard more Depeche Mode in Justin's vocals. I feel like that's what the influence on his vocal style probably was. Maybe Ian Curtis to some extent, but what I really heard was Depeche Mode. AB: You know, I've known Justin since we were kids, and we never listened to Joy Division until real late in life. When I listen to him since, I hear more like Bowie and Gahan. I understand why people say that, it's because of the baritone register and because of some songs that he's kind of monotone on. People started saying Joy Division really early on, and people always want to compare us to something. I guess there's not really that many things you can compare our music to. JH: Exactly, yeah. AB: You've got to put it into some kind of box, and people try to do that. But we're really honest about our influences. We were way more into New Order than Joy Division. I think back in the day when we were growing up, you might have heard "Love Will Tear Us Apart", if you were lucky. It's not like they were playing "Transmission" on the radio. JH: Right. And, I mean, New Order is more of the dance side of that. Which is something you guys do as well, so that makes more sense than Joy Division. AB: Yeah. JH: Maybe the kids who listen to She Wants Revenge now are just discovering Joy Division themselves, and they're thinking, "This is really cool. This is a good name we can drop." AB: Honestly, it's not even the kids. The kids never say that. It's always some journalist that says it. JH: Oh yeah? AB: It's just the journalists being lazy. Typically, when the first album was out, they would hear "Tear You Apart" and wouldn't really investigate any further into the album. So their reference is that one song, and that's the one song I understand people being lazy and comparing it to Joy Division, but if you really listen to the record, you're not going to hear that. Nobody can sound like Joy Division! If they really wanted to say what they meant, they'd say Ian Curtis. JH: That's a really good point. AB: Yeah, that whole Joy Division thing I think just came down to journalists being lazy. JH: I went back through a bunch of your interviews, and they've really just asked you the same five questions. Say something about Joy Division. Say something about Interpol. AB: And who is She and why does She Want Revenge? I mean, we got to the point where we had six questions that if somebody asked them, we would end the interview. At that point, a year and a half later, if you really can't come up with your own questions, and you can't answer that stuff on Google yourself - journalists are typically very uncreative. You understand at the beginning of the album cycle that people ask you the dumb questions just because they have to - people want to know where you're from and how did you come up with the name of the band, all that kind of stuff. But come on, after a year and half, you'd expect that people would come up with more interesting and creative questions than "Who is She and why does She Want Revenge?" JH: Last time you talked to SuicideGirls, you mentioned you had this interesting relationship with a girl you met through the site. And She Wants Revenge got popular through MySpace. I was thinking about how these sites have really changed what relationships are like for people now. Is that something you guys have thought about at all when you're writing? AB: Honestly, I can't really speak for Justin as far as the lyrics are concerned. He writes them all, and we never really talk about the reasons why we do stuff - lyrics, or video concepts or artwork. It's much more interesting for us when people just interpret them for themselves. JH: So you get people reading a lot into the lyrics and coming up with these elaborate back stories behind the songs? AB: Yeah. We love that, it's great. People have all kinds of crazy ideas about what they think the lyrics are about. I mean, 99.9% of the time, they're wrong. But it's cool - we're always like, "Well, that's cool that they think the song is about that." JH: It's the kind of stuff that could easily be personal to someone. I think a lot of people hear it and go, "You know, that really sounds like me." AB: Right. We get that a lot. JH: And I think that's interesting, because I'm not necessarily sure you guys are trying to write about normal relationships. A lot of these are damaged situations. AB: Are there really normal relationships? I think the type of things that Justin talks about are more common than people think they are. JH: But if you go back to '50s and '60s pop songs, there was an idea of what a relationship was supposed to like. You had to fit whatever creative message you had into that, in some kind of subversive way. But now you guys can just come out and say it. AB: Absolutely. Thank god! We grew up listening to Depeche and the Cure and the Furs, and the Smiths, and those were all dance-oriented bands, but at the same time, their lyrics were a little bit deeper and more emotional. People could connect to them on an emotional level. Not just men, but women as well. Most of the music out there is made by men for men. There's not a lot of bands that really connect with women. One of the great things about the way Justin writes about relationships is that he's writing as a man to women. And that's something that a lot of girls on our website and on MySpace say that they really appreciate, that he does do that, and not a lot of guys do. JH: Has the makeup of the audience changed this time out? AB: No, it's the same. It's a really crazy audience. It's all young girls, young guys. You get some of the hipsters and some of the, for lack of a better word, goth-looking girls. But then we get a lot of people that grew up with the same stuff we grew up with, and are older, mid-to-late thirties or early forties. We get a really wide variety of people at the shows. The crowds look basically the same as they were last time we came around, as far as diversity of people. JH: What did you do differently on the second record? Did you start out with new goals this time around? AB: A lot of bands make the mistake on the second record of, A) they tend to go a little bit poppier, they've had some type of success, a lot of times they want to go for what some people deem as success, and they make a super-poppy album. Or they go some completely different direction, where they tend make not as a good a record as their first one, and on top of it, they tend to alienate their crowds by doing that. Our only goals were, A) we wanted to make a darker record, and B) we wanted it to be a good record as far as we were concerned. I think we both feel we did. JH: So how would you define success, just out of curiosity? AB: We never thought any of this was going to happen, so success to us is that we make music that we like, and that people out there enjoy what we do. That's success for us, and to add to that we have the opportunity to be on the road, doing what we love. It doesn't get much better than that. Do we want to sell a billion records and make millions of dollars? As far we're concerned, that would be nice. I mean, everybody wants to do that, but that's not how we look at success. We feel like we're successful just being able to be out on the road, or be in the studio, and continue to make music that people want to hear. JH: And if things blew up too much, it might actually get in the way of what you want to do. You'd have a whole new set of obligations. You hear about these big stars who say, "I just want to go back to making records in my basement." AB: No matter what happens for us, we're always going to have the same mentality, of just being two guys - you know, it's like what you said about going back in my basement? We recorded almost the whole first record at our houses. Then we got this record deal, and built a studio with our budget. So, worst case scenario, whatever happens to us, we'll always have our little dream studio that we made. Who knows what's going to happen to us, but let's just say things did blow up - we would still go back to our little room and record music the same way we've always done it. We don't really need much, we just need our little studio and ideas to bounce off each other, and we're fine. We don't feel pressure from the label - like on this record, it was like we never left the studio. We had a great time, and we didn't think about anything other than - well, I thought about coming up with ideas that Justin's going to like. That's really all we ever needed. A couple keyboards, a couple guitars, each other. JH: Talking about all those ideas - you've been asked a lot about how the first single from the last album almost didn't make it onto the record. Did you cut anything this time that you thought was a really close call? AB: Definitely. This time there were definitely a few songs that I would have like to put on there, that we saved for B-sides, imports and that kind of stuff. We recorded probably 35 or 40 songs. We had a little chalkboard in the studio, and we put them all on there and went through them all. I think we made the right decisions as far as what we put on this record. We have a song called "Love to Sleep", and it's like a ballad. I'm a sucker for a ballad. You know, Depeche would always have a really cool ballad. I like listening to whole albums, and I like a little break when it's a dance kind of band. We have a little instrumental piece on this record that kind of slows it down. So, you know, there was a song I would have liked to see on the record, but that'll come out on something else. As far as what we put on this record, I think we chose wisely. JH: Obviously meeting Depeche Mode was absolutely huge, but is there anyone else you'd really like to meet, tour with, even collaborate on a song? AB: As far as She Wants Revenge is concerned? JH: Or you personally. AB: There's a million people I'd want to work with personally. We both produce other stuff individually. I'm working on a record that's going to feature all female vocalists, and most of them are my favorites. As far as collaborating, the three names we came up with that we would like to have on this record, although they didn't work out due to scheduling problems, would be Martin Gore, and we thought about having David Bowie do something with us, and we also would love to do - and I'm sure it'll happen in the future - something with Brian from Placebo. JH: I actually just talked to him right at the end of their summer tour. AB: Justin goes way back with them, I think he appeared on their first record. Those guys are great. When we're all in the same city at the same time and have some time off, I'm sure that's going to happen. JH: Cool. AB: As far as touring, we'd love to tour with the Cure, which may possibly happen soon. The other dream band to tour with would be Bauhaus. We just did a show with the Cure a couple days, and we got to watch them for three hours. It was absolutely amazing. JH: Really not a lot of bands can pull off a solid three hour set anymore. You have to have the material to do it, and you have to really have your shit together. AB: Absolutely! and they've got the catalog, it's not like they couldn't keep going for another hour or two. But three hours is a long time, and you'd think that maybe by the end of the set, you'd get bored or something, but when they came on with their encore, we were like, "Wow, it just gets better!" JH: and it's great to see a band with that much longevity that's still good. I thought Depeche's last album was the best thing they'd done in years, and it made me happy to see that. Do you have a favorite Depeche Mode album? AB: Some Great Reward. That was really the one that I connected with growing up. I mean, I like all of them. I think that was the first one I bought, and then went back to the previous albums after I got into that one. One of those songs was kind of a theme to my first crush. JH: Did you ever own any records when you were a kid that you're now really embarrassed by? AB: No way! I'm not embarrassed about any of the albums I ever had. I like all that stuff. I mean, I still have all those records. I have a huge huge record collection, so a lot of times people come over and they start wandered through my records, and they'll pull something out like, "Bee-Gees Greatest Hits?" And I'm like, "Yeah, the Bee-Gees rule!" JH: The Bee-Gees do rule! AB: They really do. You know, I bought everything for a reason. Whether I liked it then, or like it now, or don't like it now, I liked it at one point, and I don't get embarrassed over that kind of stuff. I like everything. JH: Any new bands you've been listening to, stuff that's come out over the past couple of years? AB: There's a band from Mexico City that I listen to called Subdivision, they're really great. I love the Dears. There's not a lot of new bands I'm really that into. Tough one. I don't really listen to a lot of new music. JH: Are they any that you're aggressively NOT into? (laughs) AB: A lot! I mean, pretty much anything on the radio. I can't get into any of those boy bands that are on the rock side, all of that stuff just makes me want to listen to Satellite. JH: Alright, I guess we have to get going soon, but how about this: since people do always ask you the same handful of questions all the time, what's something they're avoiding that you wish they would ask? AB: Well, people always throw comparisons at us. It's very rare that someone says, "What influenced your first record. What influences what you do in She Wants Revenge?" We want to talk about that. It's music, it's film and it's literature, and nobody ever says anything about literature and film! It would be nice to be able discuss all the other things that influence what we do, rather than just somebody going "So, Joy Division, blah blah blah!"
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I tried to steal Adam's hat. I think Vivid & I scared him.