 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
This interview was conducted with Warren of Against Me! when they played Providence, RI on May 18. There are not many bands that sounds as genuine as Against Me!, which I think has attributed to their success, not to mention catchy as hell songwriting. Their new album is dropping in September, and I know it'll be a good one.
PL: Introduce yourself.
AM: My name is Warren and I play the drums in Against Me!
PL: Has writing new songs become more stressful with your growing popularity?
AM: No, actually, not at all. It was nice. We got to take a break from touring and hang out in Gainesville for three and a half months straight and we kind of isolated ourselves from everything and hung out in the basement of Tom's house and just played songs and wrote. It was awesome; it was really fun. It was totally isolated from any outside pressure or any thought of what anybody might or might not think about it. It was a really enjoyable process, actually.
PL: For every show on this tour, you left a spot open for a local band to play. What gave you the idea to do that and did you get a lot of responses from bands.
AM: Yeah, we got a lot of responses from bands. CDs were sent to us and tapes and stuff like that. Its nice to get to sample some local flavor everywhere you go and you get to see what folks are doing at different parts of the country, or different parts of the continent. I've been in a local band myself on several occasions.
PL: Was it tough choosing just one band to play?
AM: In some cases. Tonight, for instance, with the band that just played, Get Killed, we are good friends with their guitar player. We knew her before and she travels a lot, so it was nice to be able to play with them. In some instances, its kind of a no brainer, but sometimes its tough.
PL: Do you think its becoming tougher for local bands to play good shows with national acts because most tours are package tours lately?
AM: I don't know if its a totally recent phenomenom, but I know that there have been a lot of tours where there have been five bands that are traveling the country all as a unit, and it is that kind of package style. A lot of shows are a lot more of a production than I thought that punk rock shows would be, but I think there are a lot of shows that do close out varying local bands or whatever, for better or for worse.
PL: Do you think success changes a person?
AM: I think it can. Its a pretty big question. There's a lot of people and there's a lot of different definitions of success. I think life changes a person.
PL: If you could rub someone's face in dog shit, who would it be and why?
AM: I don't think that there's anybody that falls under that column, luckily. I'm a pretty forgiving person.
PL: Yeah, you seem it.
AM: Thats a funny question.
PL: Name one thing the Bush administration has done that you've liked or agreed with.
AM: Man, thats a tough question.
PL: The reason I'm asking is because, even though I'm not a fan of him either, I'm so sick of hearing one side against the other and there being no agreeance. Its just really starting to piss me off.
AM: Yeah, I know that its really easy for people to do that. They're not really too different, and it really is easy to fall into a sloganeering like: We don't know what we like, but we know what we don't like-and that's Bush. I think (long pause)-there's got to be something. Its kind of hard for me to follow the day to day workings. I've actually been following a little bit of the stuff with the judicial nominees anf the nomination of Bolton for the U.N. Ambassador. Right now, I'm just focusing on the things that are really bumming me out. I like-uh...I actually saw a quote from him kind of recently that I thought was kind of cool. I'm kind of stretching here, but he was talking about something and he had a terrible grammatical error where he misspoke in some obvious way.
PL: Which usually happens.
AM: Yeah, which happens often. And then he stopped and he said: "I have a tendency to butcher the English language. I get that," and then he kept on going with what he was saying. He had the moment where he verbally acknowledged that he is not really that great of a speaker. I give him some props for that.
PL: I thought he did a good job of handling 9-11 and uniting the country for a brief period of time, although it didn't last.
AM: I think that his public relations team used that to his advantage, for sure. Yeah, that was definitely the height of his approval ratings.
PL: That was the only thing I could think of. At the time-we could have been a lot worse. We could have been a lot better, but-I don't know. That was the only thing I got and it took me a few hours to think of that.
PL: Do you think things would have been better or worse if a different President were in office?
AM: America has been engaged in combat pretty consistantly for the past 60 years or something, but a bomb hasn't dropped on American soil in that entire time, with the exception of Pearl Harbor. Our conception of what it means to be at war is totally different because, us being at war means that soldiers from here are going other places, but it doesn't mean that civilians are getting bombed, there's not access to food. I think as soon as bombs start falling on American soil, people's conception of what it meant to be at war would shift drastically and people would be more eager to find peaceful resolutions. I think that that was the closest we've come, and I think that any President would have handled it in the same way: give some vague cheerful speech and kind of wave flags.
PL: I don't think they would have bombed a totally random country.
AM: Yeah, that was interesting.
AM: Yeah, its hard to say. Everybody was searching for a scapegoat.
PL: Whats one movie everyone should see?
AM: I think that "The Big Lebowski" is probably my favorite movie, but I don't know if it would do a whole lot of good to go see it besides it being really entertaining, which I guess is worthwhile, so I'm gonna say "The Big Lebowski."
PL: Are you falling for the "Star Wars" hype?
AM: I expect it to be terrible, but we're all gonna go see it tomorrow.
PL: Whats a little known fact about Florida?
AM: Florida was not really aggressively populated before air conditioning became a really common reality.
PL: Name one album, besides your own, that you think all kids should have in their collection.
AM: I like your question again. The music ones are always tricky because there's so much good music in the world to be had. I really like hip hop quite a bit, and I think that Blow Out Comb by The Digable Planets is a great album, and I recommend it highly. One of the smoothest albums ever written.
PL: Do you have any final comments?
AM: Its awesome to be on tour with Murder by Death right now. They're really sweet. This is our second show with them, but we're already getting along swimmingly, and they're a great band. Props to Murder by Death, and thank you for yoru time.