Paint it Black is, in my opinion, one of the best current hardcore bands. They have a unique songwriting style that sets them apart from other bands out there. Seeing them live is always a treat, and Dan Yemin and Andy Nelson are always fun to talk to (the few times I've talked to them). This entertaining interview touches on their progression as a band, how to keep up with current music, and their love of eating children, among other things. This interview took place on May 9 at a pizza joint right after they played a show at Club Hell.

PL: State something interesting about yourselves.
DY: Right now, we want to kill everybody...in New England.
AN: This is the third bit of pizza I've eaten from the third different place within a half hour.
DY: We're parked illegally under the bridge. We're not like trolls. We eat children and live under a bridge.
AN: We actually are illegally parked elsewhere right now.
DY: We break laws. We're fucking monsters. Its terrible. What else is interesting about us?
AN: I carry a purse.
DY: So thats all. Those are the only interesting things about us.
PL: It doesn't get more interesting than eating children.
AN: You can't get much more interesting than eating children.
DY: Its a commitment.
AN: They put up a fight.
DY: I'm vegan, unlike everyone else, so I hold them down.
AN: As you'll see, in just a second, I do eat cheese.
DY: Is that interesting enough?
PL: Yeah.
AN: I talked to this woman at a bar last night-not like that, but in a platonic friendship-who asked me within the first ten seconds of meeting me if I was a hetereosexual.
DY: Yes, very. The question is, why did she ask?
AN: I had, apparantely, within ten seconds, given her enough reason to think otherwise.
DY: Well, the evidence is staggering. Its staggering. What was the evidence? Did she say?
AN: I'm flambouyant. I was talking about how I am extremely quiet and neat and live with a man and have excellent fashion sense.
DY: All those things are true, but he is so straight its scary.
AN: I celebrate Rufus Wainwright's entire catalogue. Bobby Williams also.

PL: I interviewed you guys about five years ago. Whats gone on since then?
AN: So much.
DY: We started to rule.
AN: Oh yeah. We got good. We were horrible and I'm sorry that you had to listen to us back then.
DY: We got really good.
AN: We kind of figured it out. We figured out how to be-
DY: We figured out what kind of hardcore band we are, and got good. Its been pretty awesome. We've got the line up straightened out too.
AN: We've got a line up of serious musicians that love to have fun.
DY: And work. They have good work ethic.
AN: Yeah. We've lost some people, we've gained some people. We've made some records. We've seen some of the world.
DY: We played some shows and made a couple more records. Paradise came out in 2005 and New Lexicon came out in 2008.
PL: How did you figure out what kind of hardcore band you were going to be?
DY: I think that we turned into the type of hardcore band that we'd want to see: not ignorant and just kind of based in the roots of early punk and hardcore from the 80s, but not necessarily traditional. We've always been devotees of the Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Black Flag esthetic, but we also want to pay attention to and be influenced by the other things that we listen to.
AN: It was funny. We were in separate cars listening to the new album, picking out what sounded like what, and it was all of our favorite bands. It sounds like such a dumb thing to say, but we really are a product of things that we generally love and have become a part of our fabric as people, not just musicians, and all the things we love. I think a lot of people, punk bands especially, have a tendency to not look any further than Black Flag, Minor Threat, Bad Brains Seven Seconds-
DY: Cro Mags, Slayer.
AN: The lines are very much colored by 99% of our contempories and a lot of strict rules about what you can and can't do, and people start to flip out if you step outside of those lines. I don't necessarily fault people for that, because I am a huge fan of plenty generic sounidng bands, but at this point in our career as a band, we're just not-our first record is very much like a throwback, and we just don't have much interest in that.
DY: I like the songs that we still play from that record, but I don't like the album as a whole. To me, it seems like Kid Dynamite outtakes, and I never wanted it to be that.
AN: It took us five years, but now we're unstoppable. We were talking in the van on the way up about how its cool that in the space of four months, play the same city three times, once with Strike Anywhere, once with 100 Demons and once with Verse and Have Heart, and it makes sense. We have the ability to do that, and I think thats partially a product of us thinking outside the lines.
DY: We can play a hometown show and headline over pop punk band, brutal hardcore bands, we could open for the Circle Jerks or the Bouncing Souls, and all of that has happened in the last year. We go to the west coast and play half the shows with Leatherface and Dead to Me and the other half with Life Long Tragedy and Ceremony, and it totally makes sense.
AN: Its cool. Its definitely really nice. I can't imagine what it must be like for some of these bands to play with the same fucking style of bands every night. Its like a Civil War reenactment. Everyday must be the same.

PL: Is there anything about New Lexicon that you haven't said already or won't say in the millions of other interviews that you'll do?
DY: We're very proud of it, but I've said that. Uh-
AN: What?
DY: I got nothing. I was gonna say something that sounds kind of negative.
AN: Negative? I don't have much to say. I don't think you as a musician or an artist should ever be responsible for having to explain your work. In a lot of ways, we made an effort for it to stand for itself but also not be-just like we were talking about completely generic by the numbers punk rock-its kind of like a band like that will have a song called "Kill George Bush," and it will be about killing George Bush and it will have George Bush on the cover, and you agree with it, but you know what they're saying. We made an effort to make it the kind of thing that if you listened to it and paid attention to it, you will get more out of it.
DY: A kid Emailed me this week, asking me what the title of this song-I'm not gonna name the song- meant, and I told him that we'd split the work in half. I told him to look up this and look up this, and get back to me and tell me what you think and we'll talk about it. And he got back to me and got said it was awesome and thanked me for naming it that instead of this.
AN: I listen to a lot of political crust bands and stuff like that that have Discharge-esque bleak, serious, idiotic lyrics like "Fucking war, Fucking war, Fucking bastards die," and underneath the lyrics will have ten paragraphs stolen from a Chomsky book saying what the song is about.
DY: The explanation should never be longer than the lyrics.
AN: I get it. You subscribe to AK Press, and I'm not talking shit; I read that stuff too, but there's something to be said for creating a piece of-even if its punk-that would be way more valuable if you let people figure it out for themselves. They might get something out of it that you didn't expect. Dan did something on our Myspace: people were asking him what lyrics meant, and he asked them what they thought. We got a lot of feedback, which I thought was really cool instead of what we did on the first record, which was write down the meanings.
DY: Some people asked if we could put explanations of songs, and a lot of the hardcore I listened to in the early 90s was real political and had explanations, which was cool, but I like people to have their own meanings for it. Someone suggested that we have people send us their meanings, and I printed the ones that were semi inteligent. Even if they're in the ballpark, and I'll print mine along with it, but I won't say which ones are mine and which ones are other peoples'.
AN: I don't think that a lot of songs on the new record are about one thing. Most of them are about a lot of things.
DY: Most of them are an intersection of politics and personal stuff. And they might not even be personal stuff that has to do with those politics. On some, I thought I was writing a political song, and I looked back and realized that it was about a whole bunch of other things. Its not just that I hate the Iraq War and this is how I feel about the Iraq War, but it could have been written on the anniversary of the Iraq War.
AN: Again, this goes back into how we're into provoking a sense of depth. If you sit around and watch television and read the news, you're gonna have a reaction. You may be political, but you're not a fucking robot. You won't go "War bad, Fox News bad. The end." I remember that when the bombs started falling in Iraq, I was fucked up. I had my politics-
DY: I was literally fucked up.
AN: I don't get fucked up, but if I did, I would have had a needle sticking out of my arm. I was mentally derranged as a result of it, and it took so much more work to show a little weakness.
DY: I don't want to write songs about how hard we are, because we're weak. We're trying to live in the face of all this fucked up shit happening in the world, and we're helpless in the face of most of it. If you write a song about how hard you are, it doesn't acknowledge the fact of how helpless and vulnerable you are. I'm not gonna pretend we're not. I'll talk trash about how nobody can stop us cause we're the best, but we're also really vulnerable and terrified. Just as a punk growing up, I was really awkward and terrified.
AN: I could relate to songs about people being awesome and great. The songs I could relate to were Screeching Weasel songs about how everybody hates me and I hate everyone and girls hate me and I'm fucking miserable. I'd just sit in my room and stew about it. That was what my life was life. I didn't want to hear songs about fighting; I wanted to hear songs about beating off in your room with your mom right down the hall cause that was what my life was like.

PL: I know with CVA, you wrote everything. Was the writing of New Lexicon more collaborative?
DY: Yes. I wrote the skeletons of all the songs, and I demoed them with a drum machine, bass and guitars and I'd send them to the guys and they'd practice them for hours and hours and hours, even without me. They'd make them better. I'd figure out how the vocals fell. I think this time, we're gonna do a seven inch next and I'm just gonna show up with my guitar to practice and show everybody the songs like back in the day before you could record songs at home and just Email them to people.
AN: Before GarageBand.
PL: How often do you guys practice?
DY: Its kind of random.
AN: It depends on what we have going on.
DY: If we have shows, we'll practice once or twice before each show. If we have a tour, we'll try to practice twice before then. It depends. We're going to the west coast next week and we'll probably practice three times before that.
AN: I'd like to play all day, everyday. My life right now, I'd just like to sit around and practice, but these guys have jobs and families and other things that prevent them from doing that as much. If it was up to me, we'd practice everyday.
DY: I'm gonna start going to Jared's and practicing. Him and me are gonna write a song together just drums and vocals. In the studio, some of the songs I sang just over the drums because guitar and bass weren't done, and it sounded awesome.
When we were writing the record, we'd practice constantly. I got married last summer and the Lifetime record came out last year, so I wasn't as available, but these geniuses spent weekends where they'd play all day Saturday, eat pizza, go swimming and practice all day Sunday.
AN: Its weird. Sometimes we'll practice and its good, and other times it'll be horrible. We were practicing last week and we were wondering why we even do this. Even today, we got out of the van, onto the stage-
DY: Blacklisted was finishing their set right as we pulled up.
AN: And we were still pretty good.
DY: I was not at the top of my game because I was driving the whole time.
AN: I think obviously there's a huge difference when you play together and just banging out all the songs, which is how most bands practice.
DY: Sometimes we'll get back from tour and not see each other for a month, and we'll practice and it'll be amazing. Sometimes we'll practice five times and it'll be horrible.

PL: How do you keep up with current bands?
AN: Oh my God. I don't have much of a life and I don't have many friends. Its kind of a business to me because I book shows in Philly, and I kind of do a good job with it.
DY: He does an amazing job.
AN: And to do good shows, you have to know whats happening. I'll make it a point to spend a whole day on message boards and find out who is putting out records. I spend every dollar I make on records. New records, old records.
DY: When we were choosing a name, sorry to interrupt, he would know of some band from Iceland that put out a demo with that name. It could be annoying, but he really knows so much shit.
AN: The problem is is that its useless really. I'd really like to know something that I could use as a career. This is the thing that I know the most about. Its good at times, because, to me, there's nothing more exciting than new records. If the question is how do I stay abreast to what is happening, I don't think its really hard to. I was talking to Alex earlier about how I always say things in interviews that I regret, and this is gonna be one of them, I think having decent taste helps a lot, and I think I have decent taste. I have at least eight years of experience doing shows, and I don't know how many years of going to shows every fucking day. Thats field experience, and I built a sort of knowledge background. There's still people who go to shows everyday and still have shit taste, but I think the ability to check something out and know if its cool or shit-
DY: It helps a lot when we're writing, because he can smell bullshit a mile away. We'll have a good song with good parts, and he'll say that a transistion is bad and ruins the whole song and if we don't change it, he doesn't want to record it or every play it in front of people.
AN: I am hyper critical.
DY: But its good. We'll play 50 things, and we'll go through those what would Nirvana do moments, and it'll sound awesome.
AN: And then the songwriting process, I'll be like "Sounds good." I think everybody's happy if they don't have to listen to me complain, which I do a lot.
DY: But now we've got a whole bunch of people in the band who complain.
AN: I would like to take credit for that. I try to encourage bandmates to complain more and more.
DY: He recruits people who like to snivel more and more.
AN: Yeah, thats true.
DY: This guy's an amazing guitarist, but he's also a whiny baby, so I think he'll work out.
AN: The other thing, my other problem is that I'm an idiot and I'll go on tour for a few weeks and come home and go to a show that night, and then fly to a festival right before going on a tour.
DY: He is really smart about music.
AN: Most people who know the most about records are horrible assholes who don't have any skills. It helped when we booked our record release weekend.
DY: There were two totally different shows with totally different bands. It was the best weekend ever.

PL: Are you guys a part time band?
AN: Yeah.
DY: No, we're a full time band that doesn't play a lot.
AN: Based on how much we think about it, I feel that we probably put more effort and time into it than some full time bands. Its frustrating. Managing the fact that you can only play this many shows and stuff like that, in my opinion, is way harder than just deciding to go on tour forever.
DY: No matter what you do choose to do, the 80 shows we'll play this year, as opposed to real bands that tour for three months at a time.
AN: Like Trash Talk.
DY: They'll play about 300 shows a year, and we'll play about 80, but we spend so much time planning out which shows we're going to play and making sure they're perfect and that they're with all bands we love, with very few exceptions, that I'd say I spend about 35 hours a week at my job and 35 hours a week stressing about the band. Answering Emails, doing interviews, writing songs, throwing songs away, talking to these guys about what we're doing and not doing, its a full time band. We just don't get-
AN: We just don't get the benefit of what a full time band would get...like people liking us.
DY: Like playing a town four times a year.
AN: Yeah.
DY: Providence, we'll probably play four times this year.
AN: True. Somehow, this is becoming our new hot spot.
PL: And people from Providence don't usually go to shows.
AN: The shows have actually been great, but we didn't play very well.
DY: The last show was really great.
PL: The Strike Anywhere one?
DY: Yeah. These guys sort of look back a little bit and think about what they fucked up, but I judge it all by how many pile ons there are, or how little I have to sing.
AN: That never happens. I'm a bad person. It took three years before I could say that we played a good show.
DY: Thats true, and thats a bad combination because I want everybody to be stoked. When we're done-
AN: He'll be like "Wasn't that great?"
DY: And I'll look at him and he looks like someone just killed his mom. I'll ask whats wrong and he'll say "Oh, nothing." I'm like fuck. He looks like he wants to crawl into a sewer.
AN: Thats bad news and I'm spreading it around.
DY: Thanks for sharing.
AN: Tonight was fun, though. I had a blast. Its not really our crowd, exactly. It makes sense. We should be able to play shows with 100 Demons, but its not exactly our crowd. We have actually played with 100 Demons a couple times, and I think they're cool-
DY: But to their average fan, we're a little soft.
AN: And we drove and sat in traffic in Connecticut for about seven hours.
DY: And we pulled up here just in time to go on, so we definitely had something to prove. I think we pulled it off.
AN: Yeah, and I like shows like that, sometimes, because even a band that is moderately popular to get really comfortable with the routine of just showing up.
DY: Phone it in.
AN: I don't think they phone it in, but it feels a little different. Like tonight felt a little different, and that was good. I think we need to settle before the show ends. (this was an early show becuase Club Hell has a dance night on Fridays) Well, thank you. I'm gonna go get paid because all we care about is money. Thank you again.

PL: You guys drove ten hours just to play this show?
DY: Well, it should be five hours, but Connecticut is like a scary scary suburban affluent white people trap. I think Connecticut is the trap to keep people from getting to Rhode Island. The 100 miles to go from the George Washington Bridge to New Haven, took about five hours when it should only take an hour and a half. It sucked.

PL: Name one album, besides your own, you think all people should have in their collection.
DY: Out of Step, by Minor Threat.

PL: Is there anything else you want to say?
DY: I just wanted to say thanks to you for continuing to take an interest in the band and supporting us, and to anyone who comes out and supports us in any way: thank you. We're greatful.

Written by: RF
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