Nader critiques political apathy, personal values
Nader discusses his childhood in new memoir in relevance to today's youth
by Scott Bolohan
Staff Writer
He is either one of the most heroic or villainous figures in America history, either loved or hated by Americans. But no matter how divisive, some feel Ralph Nader has made an impact.
Since his 1965 book, "Unsafe At Any Speed," that looked into the safety of the auto industry, Nader has dedicated his life to becoming a consumer advocate.
Lately however, Nader has been viewed in a less favorable light since his 2000 presidential bid that many believe cost Al Gore the presidency.
Either way, Nader’s importance cannot be denied. As a testament to this, he was named one of Atlantic Monthly’s "100 Most Influential Americans (Ever)," one of only three living people on the list.
Nader, 72, continues to be active with his new documentary, "An Unreasonable Man," premiering March 2 at the Music Box Theater. He has also released a new book, "The Seventeen Traditions," about the traditions and values that were instilled in him as a child. He will be appearing at the Borders on Michigan Avenue on February 21st to sign copies of his book.
For a man who made his career on investigative work, writing a memoir was a change, but he feels just as strongly about it.
"That is something I haven’t done before. I thought putting down the different ways that my mother and father raised their four children in a factory town in northwest Connecticut…would be of interest and helpful to a lot of parents today," Nader said. "A lot of the ways they raised us are very adaptable. It’s got a lot of relevance today," Nader said.
Nader decided to release the book because he is very concerned with the current state of American families, whom he feels are moving away from the very values that he cherishes.
"I think we need more self-consciousness from families around the country, so they preserve their generational experience and insight," Nader said. "This is not just sentimental, believe me. This is very important for nurturing children and giving them their own self-confidence and not letting external influences shatter the family the way they are at the present time."
Nader is also disturbed by the political apathy of many college students—people who were among his biggest supporters in his 2000 run for president.
"It’s more than just getting out the vote, it’s getting out smart votes, where students and young people do their homework and not just knee-jerk their way because their grandparents were Democrats or Republicans," Nader said.
Nader also feels that students should not only become more informed about politics but should be directly involved with the political process.
"I think it’s also important for students to think of running for election themselves in a few years at the local level. The political system is so corrupted by big money that it pushes out good candidates who don’t want to go through the dirty grind and compromise their soul," Nader said.
Nader, who has run as a third party candidate for the presidency in the last three elections feels that there is hope for third parties in America, in particular at the state and local level.
However, it may be a longer time before there is a third party president.
"If you’re asking about the national level, the system is terribly rigged against third parties right now with huge ballot access barriers and one or the other party can sue or harass and delay or get their own political judges to disqualify thousands of signatures on the petitions. Illinois has got a problem like that," Nader said.
Nader has been a vocal critic of President George Bush since his election, going as far as to suggest his impeachment. While he admits it does not appear that Bush will be leaving office before his term is over, he feels that American citizens should still take some steps to change the president’s political agenda.
Nader suggested supporting the organization, The World Can’t wait, which is demanding the resignation of Bush and Cheney.
"There are so many principles of impeachment that can be applied to him and have been written up by the Center for Constitutional Rights," Nader said.
He also suggested putting pressure on the presidency through the polls, demonstrations, student newspapers or student radio stations.
"The pressure is increasing and increasing, they are starting to feel it in Washington. Their polls are plummeting, and they know they are going to face a lot of subpoenas from the Democratic committee chairs in the next few weeks," Nader said.
In recent interviews, he criticized 2008 presidential candidate and current Democratic frontrunner, Hilliary Clinton as "a panderer and a flatterer." When he was asked about Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s candidacy, he took a more apprehensive approach.
"Well we have to wait and see. He’s obviously got great capacity, and he knows what the score is and he knows where the powers that be are," Nader said. "But in the two years in the Senate, he’s been reluctant to take strong stands against corporate power and I think that is the key measure of a presidential candidate because corporations dominate our politics, our elections. So we’ll give it some time and see how he does."
Nader has been an opponent of the Iraq War since it began. He feels that immediate action is necessary to deal with the war.
"I think there should be a six-month withdrawal, and during those six months, it will knock the bottom out on the insurgency because their only rationale is our military occupation and commercial occupation over their oil in Iraq," Nader said. "Ten officials in the Bush administration, at least, have said our military presence is fueling and attracting more and more people to train in terrorist areas. So it’s quite clear that it’s only going to get worse if we stay there."
Although Nader appeared on "The Daily Show" earlier this month, he feels that the show is not a viable news source and displays unease with the younger generations in America who have gravitated toward "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" at the expense of more credible news programs.
"They are better than nothing, but certainly not serious enough—not detailed enough. You shouldn’t have to giggle to get news," Nader said. "It’s nice to watch them, it’s very clever. But I think we have to ask young people to get more serious. They’re spending too much time in a world of entertainment and music, iPods, gossiping on cell phones, watching screens."
Nader feels that the youth of America should look to the past for inspiration in how to live their lives.
"It’s their country, it’s their world, and they should allocate more time to serious pursuits and do what their forbearers did in the 1960s against the war and for civil rights and the environment and so many other things that students today forget about," Nader said.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Greg Giraldo Interview
Giraldo’s world
Interview
by Scott Bolohan
Staff Writer
Greg Giraldo’s path to comedy is one filled with unexpected twists and turns, and law degrees. After attending Columbia University for his undergraduate degree, he went to Harvard to get his law degree. After a brief stint as a lawyer, Giraldo has become a socially provocative comic, appearing regularly on "Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn" and on Comedy Central Roasts. He can also be seen on the annual year end "Last Laugh" specials. This summer, he provided the vocals for the spoken word track "Underwear Inside the Pants," which reached number four in Australia and topped the iTunes download chart. He released his first CD, "Good Day to Cross a River" in the fall, and will bring his act to the Chicago Improv from Feb. 14 to the 18. Giraldo spoke to The DePaulia in his usual sarcastic and self-depreciating manner on topics covering love, not being a superhero and his international rock star status.
The DePaulia (TD): Are you taking any different approaches to performing on Valentine’s Day?
Greg Giraldo (GG): (Laughs) Yeah, I’m going to bring the love. I see my role as a Valentine’s Day performer as an opportunity to bring people closer together.
TD: Do you have any love advice?
GG: You’re talking to a guy who’s married with three kids, so clearly I’m not the one to give advice on how to live a happy, fulfilled life.
TD: What were you like in college?
GG: I had long hair, I was in a band, I was drunk a lot. I was an English major, so I did a lot of writing and I did okay. I was at Columbia, so it’s not like there were any hot chicks to chase. Pretty much get drunk and study.
TD: Why do you think a lot of comedians go to some really good schools?
GG: I don’t really know. I think there’s a lot of comedians going to a lot of shitty schools too. But I think you hear that comedians are generally above average intelligence. That’s not true though. But you hear it.
TD: At what point did you decide that you should try comedy?
GG: I didn’t do stand up really, but I did little sketches. I was always kind of screwing around with comedy type of performances. I don’t really remember that final decision. I was just writing down a lot of stuff, keeping notes and starting to think about what I would do with it, kind of write some kind of show. Then I decided to just do an open mic. I just went onstage and did the open mic and that was it. Once I did that first open mic, my career skyrocketed. Overnight.
TD: How do you like playing college audiences?
GG: I like it. I mean sometimes in the past, I’ve said I didn’t love them as much. It depends on the college and your level of success. There were times when I didn’t love doing colleges because there were a lot of things about doing colleges because of the student activity fee payment, you can’t really tell if the show is going to be good or not based on what you’re getting paid. Sometimes you’re getting a decent check and you think its going to be a great show and you show up and it turns out it’s in the cafeteria and there’s six kids there, foreign exchange students that don’t speak English. So that kind of thing would happen early in my career, but now with more and more people coming out that know me, it’s usually really great. Obviously you’re dealing with a homogenous group of people, everyone is the same age, everyone is going through the exact same experiences, and as I get old, it starts to get more pathetic trying to remember my college days to relate on some level.
TD: In the last episode of "Tough Crowd," Colin Quinn went on an angry rant about the shows cancellation. How did you feel about it?
GG: Well, I mean it sucked. With TV they do all kinds of horse***t all the time. It was frustrating, it was very annoying and it was the first really great thing that I’d been a part of that I really loved doing. So it was enormously frustrating. The show had been floating around on the brink for a long time. Nobody does you any favors on TV. It’s a miracle anything stays on at all, so anytime you’re on it, you feel like a big deal. It was frustrating because it felt like that show could have really worked, and the fact that it didn’t become a smash was annoying. But what are you going to do?
TD: What was your relationship like with the other regulars on the show?
GG: Hostile and fraught with sexual tension. (Laughs) That was pretty much it, depending on what guests were on. We were all pretty friendly. Basically you saw the dynamic that was our everyday existence.
TD: What about the whole Dennis Leary incident, when you called him out on the show for not being funny?
GG: Try to put yourself in my shoes and imagine answering this question, two years after the fact when Dennis Leary is the star and creator of one of the best TV shows ever on TV. It’s a little pathetic for me to be dwelling on the glory days of my big f**king clever rhetoric, one time two years ago. It was one of those moments. I don’t really feel like f**king dwelling on it. (Laughs)
TD: When you do roasts, are you ever afraid about going too far?
GG: Yeah, I mean you always write a bunch of jokes for your own amusement that are way extreme and ridiculously over the top and then you think, "Well are they? Maybe I could do this one." It’s a very fine line. I don’t worry about going too far if it’s funny, you worry about what exactly is going to kill. You’re trying to kill, you’re trying to be as funny as possible. Not to hurt anybody’s feelings, but the roasts are mean by definition. So if it’s too far, and by too far, I only mean too far in the sense that it wouldn’t get laughs, or they would get bad groans as opposed to good groans. Sometimes you just go for groans, not horrified groans, just kind of amused groans. It’s pretty easy to see in any given situation what too far would be.
TD: Do you feel like anything is really off limits anymore in comedy?
GG: There’s never been anything that’s been off limits specifically. Everything depends on context, how you’re doing it, why you’re doing it. But there are plenty of things you could say that would get you in trouble depending on the context. But then when you’re saying anything off limits, there are plenty of things that can be discussed. There’s nothing that you can’t, no area or topic that you can’t in some way make funny. But then again, you have to make it funny. Michael Richards found out there are certain things off limits.
TD: After being a panelist on "Tough Crowd," how do you like switching the roles and hosting "Stand Up Nation?"
GG: When I first started doing it, it was a very different thing. It was kind of a bulls**t, throw away thing I was doing for a little while until I could figure out what else I wanted to do with Comedy Central. Basically, it was supposed to be me hosting the whole night, which already existed in its current state and they tried to do some kind of wraparound show. Actually, shooting the show was fun and the segments we actually got to do were really funny given the budget and the time we had to do it all. It was never going to be like, "Here’s my show." It was frustrating in that sense.
TD: "Underwear Inside the Pants" went to number four in Australia, do you feel like you’re a rock star?
GG: (Laughs) Yeah. Whoo! I feel like a rock star! (Laughs)
TD: Do you have a lot of Australian groupies?
GG: I’m told I should go to Australia and capitalize on my big rock star status out there, but I think the nation still needs time to grieve Steve Irwin. Maybe when that whole thing has passed, I might go over there. I heard I could be the new Paul Hogan. I could be the new Yahoo Serious.
TD: What were the interactions with the other comedians like on the bus on the Insomniac Tour?
GG: (laughs) Man, it was wild! (laughs) I actually didn’t go on the bus, I drove around, I rented a Harley out on the West Coast with a friend of mine who has a bike and we just rode motorcycles.
TD: Is there anything else you’d like to say to the students of DePaul University?
GG: Drop out, man. College degrees are overrated. Take that loan money and invest it. In 20 years at 7 percent, get one of the young Asian kids to help you do the math on that one.
Interview
by Scott Bolohan
Staff Writer
Greg Giraldo’s path to comedy is one filled with unexpected twists and turns, and law degrees. After attending Columbia University for his undergraduate degree, he went to Harvard to get his law degree. After a brief stint as a lawyer, Giraldo has become a socially provocative comic, appearing regularly on "Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn" and on Comedy Central Roasts. He can also be seen on the annual year end "Last Laugh" specials. This summer, he provided the vocals for the spoken word track "Underwear Inside the Pants," which reached number four in Australia and topped the iTunes download chart. He released his first CD, "Good Day to Cross a River" in the fall, and will bring his act to the Chicago Improv from Feb. 14 to the 18. Giraldo spoke to The DePaulia in his usual sarcastic and self-depreciating manner on topics covering love, not being a superhero and his international rock star status.
The DePaulia (TD): Are you taking any different approaches to performing on Valentine’s Day?
Greg Giraldo (GG): (Laughs) Yeah, I’m going to bring the love. I see my role as a Valentine’s Day performer as an opportunity to bring people closer together.
TD: Do you have any love advice?
GG: You’re talking to a guy who’s married with three kids, so clearly I’m not the one to give advice on how to live a happy, fulfilled life.
TD: What were you like in college?
GG: I had long hair, I was in a band, I was drunk a lot. I was an English major, so I did a lot of writing and I did okay. I was at Columbia, so it’s not like there were any hot chicks to chase. Pretty much get drunk and study.
TD: Why do you think a lot of comedians go to some really good schools?
GG: I don’t really know. I think there’s a lot of comedians going to a lot of shitty schools too. But I think you hear that comedians are generally above average intelligence. That’s not true though. But you hear it.
TD: At what point did you decide that you should try comedy?
GG: I didn’t do stand up really, but I did little sketches. I was always kind of screwing around with comedy type of performances. I don’t really remember that final decision. I was just writing down a lot of stuff, keeping notes and starting to think about what I would do with it, kind of write some kind of show. Then I decided to just do an open mic. I just went onstage and did the open mic and that was it. Once I did that first open mic, my career skyrocketed. Overnight.
TD: How do you like playing college audiences?
GG: I like it. I mean sometimes in the past, I’ve said I didn’t love them as much. It depends on the college and your level of success. There were times when I didn’t love doing colleges because there were a lot of things about doing colleges because of the student activity fee payment, you can’t really tell if the show is going to be good or not based on what you’re getting paid. Sometimes you’re getting a decent check and you think its going to be a great show and you show up and it turns out it’s in the cafeteria and there’s six kids there, foreign exchange students that don’t speak English. So that kind of thing would happen early in my career, but now with more and more people coming out that know me, it’s usually really great. Obviously you’re dealing with a homogenous group of people, everyone is the same age, everyone is going through the exact same experiences, and as I get old, it starts to get more pathetic trying to remember my college days to relate on some level.
TD: In the last episode of "Tough Crowd," Colin Quinn went on an angry rant about the shows cancellation. How did you feel about it?
GG: Well, I mean it sucked. With TV they do all kinds of horse***t all the time. It was frustrating, it was very annoying and it was the first really great thing that I’d been a part of that I really loved doing. So it was enormously frustrating. The show had been floating around on the brink for a long time. Nobody does you any favors on TV. It’s a miracle anything stays on at all, so anytime you’re on it, you feel like a big deal. It was frustrating because it felt like that show could have really worked, and the fact that it didn’t become a smash was annoying. But what are you going to do?
TD: What was your relationship like with the other regulars on the show?
GG: Hostile and fraught with sexual tension. (Laughs) That was pretty much it, depending on what guests were on. We were all pretty friendly. Basically you saw the dynamic that was our everyday existence.
TD: What about the whole Dennis Leary incident, when you called him out on the show for not being funny?
GG: Try to put yourself in my shoes and imagine answering this question, two years after the fact when Dennis Leary is the star and creator of one of the best TV shows ever on TV. It’s a little pathetic for me to be dwelling on the glory days of my big f**king clever rhetoric, one time two years ago. It was one of those moments. I don’t really feel like f**king dwelling on it. (Laughs)
TD: When you do roasts, are you ever afraid about going too far?
GG: Yeah, I mean you always write a bunch of jokes for your own amusement that are way extreme and ridiculously over the top and then you think, "Well are they? Maybe I could do this one." It’s a very fine line. I don’t worry about going too far if it’s funny, you worry about what exactly is going to kill. You’re trying to kill, you’re trying to be as funny as possible. Not to hurt anybody’s feelings, but the roasts are mean by definition. So if it’s too far, and by too far, I only mean too far in the sense that it wouldn’t get laughs, or they would get bad groans as opposed to good groans. Sometimes you just go for groans, not horrified groans, just kind of amused groans. It’s pretty easy to see in any given situation what too far would be.
TD: Do you feel like anything is really off limits anymore in comedy?
GG: There’s never been anything that’s been off limits specifically. Everything depends on context, how you’re doing it, why you’re doing it. But there are plenty of things you could say that would get you in trouble depending on the context. But then when you’re saying anything off limits, there are plenty of things that can be discussed. There’s nothing that you can’t, no area or topic that you can’t in some way make funny. But then again, you have to make it funny. Michael Richards found out there are certain things off limits.
TD: After being a panelist on "Tough Crowd," how do you like switching the roles and hosting "Stand Up Nation?"
GG: When I first started doing it, it was a very different thing. It was kind of a bulls**t, throw away thing I was doing for a little while until I could figure out what else I wanted to do with Comedy Central. Basically, it was supposed to be me hosting the whole night, which already existed in its current state and they tried to do some kind of wraparound show. Actually, shooting the show was fun and the segments we actually got to do were really funny given the budget and the time we had to do it all. It was never going to be like, "Here’s my show." It was frustrating in that sense.
TD: "Underwear Inside the Pants" went to number four in Australia, do you feel like you’re a rock star?
GG: (Laughs) Yeah. Whoo! I feel like a rock star! (Laughs)
TD: Do you have a lot of Australian groupies?
GG: I’m told I should go to Australia and capitalize on my big rock star status out there, but I think the nation still needs time to grieve Steve Irwin. Maybe when that whole thing has passed, I might go over there. I heard I could be the new Paul Hogan. I could be the new Yahoo Serious.
TD: What were the interactions with the other comedians like on the bus on the Insomniac Tour?
GG: (laughs) Man, it was wild! (laughs) I actually didn’t go on the bus, I drove around, I rented a Harley out on the West Coast with a friend of mine who has a bike and we just rode motorcycles.
TD: Is there anything else you’d like to say to the students of DePaul University?
GG: Drop out, man. College degrees are overrated. Take that loan money and invest it. In 20 years at 7 percent, get one of the young Asian kids to help you do the math on that one.
Monday, February 12, 2007
Scott Ellis Interview
A multitalented man
Interview
by Scott Bolohan
Staff Writer
Since walking out of the Theater School in 1978 in his cap and gown, Scott Ellis was a determined actor with a dream. Now Ellis, whose play "Twelve Angry Men" runs through Feb. 11 at the LaSalle Bank Theater, returns with over 20 plays under his belt, four Tony nominations and as one of Broadways most respected directors. But Ellis is quick to attribute his success to his experiences at DePaul’s Theater School.
"I had great teachers and I was able to learn to get a backbone for having a career in the theater and that all came from the teachers and the classes and what they taught. I was able to walk away with that backbone that was able to serve me over the years. It’s a tough business and there are a lot of ups and downs, but if you have a strong base, which I got from going to DePaul, it makes things a lot easier," Ellis said.
Ellis grew up in Washington, D.C., but he was drawn to DePaul because of its prestigious theater school.
"The theater department was considered one of the best in the country and I auditioned for several schools. I went there for a day and I loved the audition and working with the instructors. With the school and Chicago, I thought that would be a great place to go," Ellis said.
As a student, Ellis described himself as being "very work-orientated." After graduating and working as an actor for about 10 years, he switched to directing.
"I got an opportunity to direct something in New York, something that I wanted to do, and it was successful. So I thought this would be something that I would be interested in exploring. I’m fortunate that what I learned as an actor served me well as a director, and hopefully a better director by understanding what actors go through, what the process is. I love actors and I think that is one of my stronger points."
As the associate artistic director of Roundabout Theater Company, Ellis has directed other plays such as "1776," "She Loves Me" and "Entertaining Mr. Sloane" starring Alec Baldwin. He says that his time at DePaul also helped him form his approach to directing.
"Part of it, I very much learned from the Theater School, which is really starting from the beginning and trying to find the truth of the character and the situation that the character is at. That’s the base of all good work and all good acting, and that’s where I always begin."
"Twelve Angry Men" was originally on Broadway, and earned Ellis a Tony nomination for Best Director. He is now touring the country with stars Richard Thomas from "The Waltons" and George Wendt from "Cheers."
Ellis was faced with a number of challenges bringing the classic story to life.
"It was a challenge to direct the play for a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest was that I had to do it in a single room sitting around a table. So how do you get 12 people in one room and stage it in a way that is still interesting? A large part of the challenge is to explore that and find how to move 12 people in a room that still makes it theatrical and interesting…I think with something like ‘Twelve Angry Men’ there is certainly some expectations, whether it is from the film or a production of it that someone has seen, or an idea of what it is or should be. So you have those challenges too, to make it fresh and seem like you are not repeating something from another production."
Over his career, Ellis has also directed for television, including such shows as "Frasier," "30 Rock" and "Hope and Faith."
He says directing for television is a different world than theater. "Television is very, very different. First of all, it’s extremely fast. The storytelling is all out of order. You can shoot the final scene on the first day and the first scene on the last day. I think the biggest part is you don’t have the time to make strong choices about the characters and inspiration, you have to just hope they are right."
"Also, dealing with cameras, you learn that the camera can help tell a story. You’re going to tell the audience where to look. On stage, you don’t have a camera telling you where to look. It’s how you light it, it’s how you stage it, how you focus it."
Ellis is currently in rehearsals for "Curtains," a new Broadway musical opening on March 22 starring David Hyde Pierce. It was one of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s last musicals, who also wrote "Cabaret" and "Chicago." He also says that he’ll be doing more television, working on a film and then opening "Twelve Angry Men" in London before fall. However, Ellis says that he’s not overwhelmed by his projects.
"You realize when the work comes, you take it if it’s something you want to do. You have to balance a lot of things because that’s what you do in the profession. I’ve become involved with the DePaul Theater School because I’m very passionate about helping them and helping the students that are coming after me. I would like them to build a new Theater School because I think it’s a great school and a great university and I want them to get a better environment to create in a building. I’m very passionate about trying to make that happen."
Although Ellis has been nominated for four Tony Awards, four Drama Desk Awards, three Outer Critics Circle Awards, and was the winner of a Drama Desk Award and Outer Critics Choice Award for Outstanding Director of a Musical, the accomplishment he is most proud of is much more humble.
"I think I’m most proud of continuing to work. I’m still doing what I love to do. I have this thing where I sometimes wonder about my career like, ‘What am I doing?’"
"Not in a hundred years would I believe that would have happened. That would have been beyond my wildest dreams as that kid walking out of that school. When I remind myself of that, I’m very grateful of the opportunities I’ve had, and I’m still happy to have the opportunities to work and do what I love to do," Ellis said.
As a famed graduate of the Theater School, Ellis offered up some advice for current and future theater students.
"There’s absolutely no guarantee for anybody for success or failure. No one knows who’s going to succeed and stay in the business. I remember when I auditioned for DePaul, the one thing that was said was that if you would be happy doing anything else, then you should go do it. I didn’t quite understand that at the time, but I do now. It means that it takes so much passion and work to have a career that you have to want to do it more than anyone else. I always tell students you should do it until you are not happy doing and if you want to do something else, you should go do it. The main thing is, it takes a lot of perseverance and it’s a lot of work. There are many highs and many lows, and you can’t look at it like that, you have to look at it more as the whole picture."
Interview
by Scott Bolohan
Staff Writer
Since walking out of the Theater School in 1978 in his cap and gown, Scott Ellis was a determined actor with a dream. Now Ellis, whose play "Twelve Angry Men" runs through Feb. 11 at the LaSalle Bank Theater, returns with over 20 plays under his belt, four Tony nominations and as one of Broadways most respected directors. But Ellis is quick to attribute his success to his experiences at DePaul’s Theater School.
"I had great teachers and I was able to learn to get a backbone for having a career in the theater and that all came from the teachers and the classes and what they taught. I was able to walk away with that backbone that was able to serve me over the years. It’s a tough business and there are a lot of ups and downs, but if you have a strong base, which I got from going to DePaul, it makes things a lot easier," Ellis said.
Ellis grew up in Washington, D.C., but he was drawn to DePaul because of its prestigious theater school.
"The theater department was considered one of the best in the country and I auditioned for several schools. I went there for a day and I loved the audition and working with the instructors. With the school and Chicago, I thought that would be a great place to go," Ellis said.
As a student, Ellis described himself as being "very work-orientated." After graduating and working as an actor for about 10 years, he switched to directing.
"I got an opportunity to direct something in New York, something that I wanted to do, and it was successful. So I thought this would be something that I would be interested in exploring. I’m fortunate that what I learned as an actor served me well as a director, and hopefully a better director by understanding what actors go through, what the process is. I love actors and I think that is one of my stronger points."
As the associate artistic director of Roundabout Theater Company, Ellis has directed other plays such as "1776," "She Loves Me" and "Entertaining Mr. Sloane" starring Alec Baldwin. He says that his time at DePaul also helped him form his approach to directing.
"Part of it, I very much learned from the Theater School, which is really starting from the beginning and trying to find the truth of the character and the situation that the character is at. That’s the base of all good work and all good acting, and that’s where I always begin."
"Twelve Angry Men" was originally on Broadway, and earned Ellis a Tony nomination for Best Director. He is now touring the country with stars Richard Thomas from "The Waltons" and George Wendt from "Cheers."
Ellis was faced with a number of challenges bringing the classic story to life.
"It was a challenge to direct the play for a lot of reasons, but one of the biggest was that I had to do it in a single room sitting around a table. So how do you get 12 people in one room and stage it in a way that is still interesting? A large part of the challenge is to explore that and find how to move 12 people in a room that still makes it theatrical and interesting…I think with something like ‘Twelve Angry Men’ there is certainly some expectations, whether it is from the film or a production of it that someone has seen, or an idea of what it is or should be. So you have those challenges too, to make it fresh and seem like you are not repeating something from another production."
Over his career, Ellis has also directed for television, including such shows as "Frasier," "30 Rock" and "Hope and Faith."
He says directing for television is a different world than theater. "Television is very, very different. First of all, it’s extremely fast. The storytelling is all out of order. You can shoot the final scene on the first day and the first scene on the last day. I think the biggest part is you don’t have the time to make strong choices about the characters and inspiration, you have to just hope they are right."
"Also, dealing with cameras, you learn that the camera can help tell a story. You’re going to tell the audience where to look. On stage, you don’t have a camera telling you where to look. It’s how you light it, it’s how you stage it, how you focus it."
Ellis is currently in rehearsals for "Curtains," a new Broadway musical opening on March 22 starring David Hyde Pierce. It was one of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s last musicals, who also wrote "Cabaret" and "Chicago." He also says that he’ll be doing more television, working on a film and then opening "Twelve Angry Men" in London before fall. However, Ellis says that he’s not overwhelmed by his projects.
"You realize when the work comes, you take it if it’s something you want to do. You have to balance a lot of things because that’s what you do in the profession. I’ve become involved with the DePaul Theater School because I’m very passionate about helping them and helping the students that are coming after me. I would like them to build a new Theater School because I think it’s a great school and a great university and I want them to get a better environment to create in a building. I’m very passionate about trying to make that happen."
Although Ellis has been nominated for four Tony Awards, four Drama Desk Awards, three Outer Critics Circle Awards, and was the winner of a Drama Desk Award and Outer Critics Choice Award for Outstanding Director of a Musical, the accomplishment he is most proud of is much more humble.
"I think I’m most proud of continuing to work. I’m still doing what I love to do. I have this thing where I sometimes wonder about my career like, ‘What am I doing?’"
"Not in a hundred years would I believe that would have happened. That would have been beyond my wildest dreams as that kid walking out of that school. When I remind myself of that, I’m very grateful of the opportunities I’ve had, and I’m still happy to have the opportunities to work and do what I love to do," Ellis said.
As a famed graduate of the Theater School, Ellis offered up some advice for current and future theater students.
"There’s absolutely no guarantee for anybody for success or failure. No one knows who’s going to succeed and stay in the business. I remember when I auditioned for DePaul, the one thing that was said was that if you would be happy doing anything else, then you should go do it. I didn’t quite understand that at the time, but I do now. It means that it takes so much passion and work to have a career that you have to want to do it more than anyone else. I always tell students you should do it until you are not happy doing and if you want to do something else, you should go do it. The main thing is, it takes a lot of perseverance and it’s a lot of work. There are many highs and many lows, and you can’t look at it like that, you have to look at it more as the whole picture."
Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Christian Finnegan Interview
Best interview ever
Interview by Scott Bolohan
Staff Writer
You may not recognize the name, but Christian Finnegan is everywhere. He is the guy on VH1’s "Best Week Ever" that does the segment "What Your Purchases Say About You." He appears regularly on "The Today Show." He has his own "Comedy Central Presents" special. He hosts a game show on TV Land on Monday nights. And yes, he is Chad, the only white roommate from the infamous "Chappelle’s Show" skit, "The Mad Real World." But upon the Oct. 24 release of his first CD, "Two for Fliching," Finnegan established a firm identity as an up and coming comedian. He will appear at the Ryan Auditorium at Northwestern January 27. Finnegan called The DePaulia from a noisy New York Deli and talked about everything from his hatred of Star Jones to getting hit on by Katie Couric.
The DePaulia (TD): Are you excited for the tour?
Christian Finnegan (CF): I’m really excited about it. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. I don’t get to travel with other people very often, so I’m actually looking forward to that aspect of it as well. That, you know, I won’t just be by myself, which is usually the case.
TD: What were you like in college?
CF: I think college is a very evolutionary time for every person. It’s the last time in life when you get to reinvent yourself. In high school you might have been a band geek or you might have been this or that. But in college everyone tries to reinvent themselves as something different. Usually, after a semester or so you’ve given yourself up and people realize you really actually are a dork. That first semester of college is great when you are pretending you’re really deep or really athletic or whatever. I spent a lot of college trying to figure out who I was. That’s in a lot of ways what college is for. Most people haven’t ever lived away from home before and it’s only then they find out, "I am sort of a clean person" or "I guess I am a messy person" or "I guess I am a p**n hound" or "I guess I am an alcoholic." It’s kind of like at Chuck E. Cheese. The ball crawl, you know that big pit where they have all the balls? You can fool around and be an idiot and not worry too much about getting hurt in the safe environment. Once you get out of college, you can’t. You have to be a little more thoughtful about how you can hurt yourself (laughs).
TD: Do you think college crowds are different from your typical comedy club crowds?
CF: Yeah, they definitely are. The best audiences in the world are college audiences and the worst audiences in the world are college audiences. Sometimes you go to a school and they’ll have a beautiful theater with a really good sound system and other times you’ll go to a school and they’ll have a riser set up in the corner of the cafeteria. You’ll be performing and there’s people eating Quizno’s sandwiches during the show. Those audiences don’t tend to be very good, but it’s not their fault. Comedy requires a certain amount of ambiance. There’s a reason why the lights on the audience go out. There’s a reason why a theater has certain acoustics. Cafeteria shows just tend to be awful. But when a college crowd is great, there’s never going to be a more enthusiastic crowd. Which is great, but sometimes you have to change what you do for a college crowd. They’re kind of there for a party. They want to hear jokes and stuff, but they also want to scream "whoo." They don’t want your subtle stuff, they want you to kind of hit them in the balls.
TD: When did you know that you wanted to become a comedian?
CF: Any day now (laughs). It’s one of those things where I’d love to say I was not one of those kids who fantasized about it since I was 5 years old. Although I realize looking back, that I had all these comedy albums when I was a kid. I never really thought I should start doing it. Much more than my friends, I had Steve Martin albums and Woody Allen albums, and Eddie Murphy’s "Delirious" and all these things I was obsessed about. But I never really thought, "Hey, I want to do comedy." It was just something I liked doing. I hated stand up comedy when I was in college. My reinvention of myself in college was as a pretentious bastard. I was wearing black turtlenecks and reading philosophical books. In a lot of ways comedy was a perfect fit for me because you’re performing, but it’s your own stuff, it’s your own thoughts. I always felt that stand up comedy is a great career choice for someone who is egocentric, but has a short attention span.
TD: Do you feel pressure to be funny all the time? Do people expect you to be funny when they meet you?
CF: Only unlikable people. It does happen and I understand that. I understand that everyone likes to laugh, everyone wants to have a good time, everyone wants to hear a good joke. Everyone loves that. And so when they find out you do that for a living, I think it’s a natural impulse to want to see it in action. Like, "Come on, dazzle me!" If I told people I was a tax assessor, nobody would say "Hey, value my property." That said, it can be really fatiguing when people just want you to be funny. I can’t stand people who need to be funny all the time. A lot of people feel like they need to be the center of attention all the time, and they’re annoying ... Not everyone is a Robin Williams-type person, thank God.
TD: What do you think is the best and worst part about being a comedian?
CF: I would say the best thing is that there’s a feeling that you get; the feeling you get when you come up with an idea that you just know is going to work. When you just stumble on to a line or a premise, and it usually just happens when you're at home, at three in the morning when you’re flipping channels, or you’re on the subway and you pull a piece of paper out of your pocket and you write something and you’re like, "Oh my God." You just can’t wait to get up on stage and try it. I can’t even tell you how great a feeling that is. And secondly, the feeling that you get when it’s going well on stage, it’s so intoxicating. You really feel like you’re completely in control. I always equate it to the scene at the end of "The Matrix," when all the sudden you can see the matrix and you can stop the bullets and all that cr**. But then there’s other times when you’re on stage and you’re like, "Where am I? Who am I fooling? Why did I think people would think I was funny?" Those moments happen too. They both happen a lot.
TD: Is it tough for you to come up with jokes every week for "Best Week Ever?"
CF: It really is. I don’t mean to make it sound like it is rocket science, because it certainly ain’t, but it can be exhausting. It can be difficult, like what more do I have to say about Tara Reid? What could I possible say about the show "24" at this point?
TD: What was your favorite news story of the past year?
CF: I loathe Star Jones with such a burning passion, and so anything Star Jones-related I tend to enjoy. Not even necessarily making jokes about her, I just found it hilarious to watch. So I would say probably the whole Star Jones thing. And the Mel Gibson thing, just because it was so hilarious and weird, not just the whole anti-Semitism thing.
TD: Along the same lines, how did you feel about the Michael Richards thing as a comedian?
CF: I was troubled by this and I actually wrote about it on my Web site, which I do sometimes to figure out how I feel about something. I don’t remember who this quote is by, but I’m going to totally embarrass myself by misquoting this person and probably getting the person wrong. But I think Thoreau (note: actually E.M. Forster) had this quote, "How will I know what I think until I see what I say." The whole Michael Richards thing bothered me in a sense that, as a comedian, my initial impulse is to always defend the comic to always have the right to say what they want to say and to assume that an audience just isn’t getting it. But, in Michael Richards’ case, no. I think in the end what makes me feel like I do not need to defend him is that he is not a comedian. He’s a TV star biding his time until his next wacky neighbor role comes along. I think he was pissed and thinking people shouldn’t be talking during his set, and no comic likes it when people are talking during their set. There’s ways to deal with it and ways not to deal with it. But I thought he threw that out and that he was going to be able to get to the other side of it and make it funny. But he couldn’t because he doesn’t have the ability, because he’s not a comedian. He’s not a writer at all ... I’m not even saying that insultingly. But just because you’re good at prat falls doesn’t mean you’re good at stand up. I don’t feel like I need to defend that guy. For me, it just wasn’t him throwing out the N-word, just saying the N-word is so craven, it was all the other stuff that really was ugly ... There’s no joke there, that’s just ugly, that’s just vile, pure vile. So screw that guy, I don’t feel the need to defend that guy at all.
TD: Do you find yourself rooting for celebrities to do stupid things?
CF: What you find is you don’t have to. What I get excited about is when there are new kinds of scandals. That’s what was so great about the Mel Gibson thing, it was just so different, so weird. It’s hard to constantly make jokes about somebody getting into a catfight at a dance club. That sh** happens all the time. Sex tapes, things like that, those are done. They’re just over. But something like the Mel Gibson thing, or even something like the Michael Richards thing is just so "Wow!" and weird and out there. Those are the ones I get kind of thrilled with.
In a lot of ways, comedy can be just about button pushing. If you push the right button, people will have the physical reaction of laughing, and that’s great. You can get up and do 20 minutes of fart jokes, and Lord knows, I’m not above a fart joke. But I love a fart joke you remember two weeks down the road. That, I think, is the end goal. (Laughs) (Baby crying in the background) This baby totally needs a punch in the face.
TD: In your act you always talk about being a dork when you were younger. Do you feel that you are less dorky now that you are a comedian on TV?
CF: My life is not particularly exciting. I think a lot of times, especially in college students, you guys, and I don’t mean to sound condescending or anything, but you guys don’t remember a time before basic cable, when there was just NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox. So to me, I look at what I do on VH1 as being like AAA ball. The people who are on "CSI," those people are playing in the major leagues, and I’m basically a pickup softball game. A lot of times, college students, when you’ve grown up and had MTV your whole life, TV is TV. To a lot of you students, I might as well be on "CSI" or "Seinfeld" because they just don’t understand I’m standing in a conference room in front of a piece of colored construction paper, and not getting paid particularly well to do it. (Laughs) Of course I had some issues growing up. My story was the story of a lot of kids though. Nobody is in third grade thinking, "Man, I am so popular."
TD: Did you think the "Chappelle’s Show" skit "Mad Real World" was going to be as big as it was?
CF: I had no idea it was going to be that big. I knew it was going to be that funny. When I read the script I was just blown away. I was like, "Aw, God, I can’t believe I get to do this." A lot of "Chappelle’s Show" is like when you see one of those really great episodes of "South Park" and you just wonder, why isn’t everything this funny? I remember reading the sketch and thinking, "I can’t believe how funny this is." I got really fortunate because I bumped into Neal Brennan, who is Dave’s writing partner, when he was in the process of editing the piece before it was on the air, and at that point it was 23 minutes long.
There’s a lot of stuff that was on the cutting room floor that I wished they would put out on the DVD because it was very funny. I’ll be honest with you, that part really isn’t that far from me anyways.
That character is probably me at age 15, in terms of I certainly didn’t have a lot of experience knowing a whole lot of black people growing up in suburban Massachusetts.
I mean, I wanted to. I loved the idea of knowing black people, but I didn’t actually have any experience with it. So I was able to tap into that very easily.
TD: Do people still recognize you as Chad from the sketch?
CF: It used to be insane, not a day would go by. For a while, it was probably five times a day. And it’s never like "hey." They’ll just either yell "Chappelle" or "white boy" or "you stabbed my dad" ... There are just so many lines, "What’s the square root of this apartment?" That’s the amazing thing about that sketch is there’s probably 20 lines that people can quote that most people would know what they’re quoting. I don’t even think Dave or Neal even knew it was going to be that big.
You can never predict a pop culture phenomenon like that. I can’t even fathom it. Sometimes you’ll get people who will recognize you half way through your set and they’ll start yelling, "You stabbed my dad" or "Chappelle" and it just brings everything to a grinding halt. If anyone is coming out to the show at Northwestern, please don’t yell out "Chappelle" things. What I always tell people when I’m off stage is when they tell me, "Hey man, I was the one who yelled out ‘Chappelle,’" I’m like, "In your mind, what did you envision happening? When you yelled that out, what was the best case scenario?
What was I going to say? You know what? You’re right, "Chappelle." What then? I can’t believe you’ve actually seen ‘Chappelle’s Show.’ You must be a special person." The thing is, I don’t take it lightly ... I can’t even fathom what it was like for Dave.
Dave Chappelle is not one of those people who did stand up so he could break into the acting game. He’s a stand up who happens to have had a TV show and has been in some movies. Chris Rock is the same way. So I think that’s one of the things that really contributed to Dave just wanting to pop that balloon.
People were not letting him do what he loved to do, which is to do stand up. I can understand the urge to be like, "You know what, f**k this. I’m going to go on the lam for a year, kind of start over again and make it smaller."
I’m not saying I would have done it. I probably would have stuck with it because I’m a p***y, but I can understand why someone would want to do that.
TD: Do you have any good Matt Lauer stories?
CF: I will say that Matt Lauer is a funny dude with kind of a dark sense of humor. Off camera, he’s kind of biting. He’s a little bit of a d**k, like in the best possible way. I remember the first couple times he had a couple of insults and I was like, "Wow that was a zinger."
It’s so funny, you see these people that do these shows and you’re watching these people on TV, and you’re like, "Who are these people? They seem so dumb and so easy." If you ever are on the set of "The Today Show," I’m amazed that they’re able to do what they do. It’s really like juggling in a lot of ways, so I admire the ability to do that.
I remember one time when he interviewed Britney Spears, who was chewing gum the whole time. He was wearing loafers without socks and we were on "The Today Show" the next week. And we, especially Sherrod Small, were giving him the business about not wearing socks and how awful his ankles looked and apparently we heard back from the producers that he was a little bit insulted by that.
There was also a moment where Katie Couric sort of propositioned me sexually. It was joking, but it was a little bit creepy. They were doing a segment about mammograms, the screening for breast cancer, and Katie had a mammogram and they were showing footage from it and we were the next segment.
And Katie said something like, "I know you guys have always really wanted to see my breasts." And I made some joke like, "Oh yeah Katie, I know, it’s been weeks." And then she just looked at me dead in the eye and completely without smiling or anything was like, "Well come on up to the dressing room afterwards and we’ll see if we can change that."
She was joking, she was just being silly, but she really just held the eye contact for an awkwardly long time. And she walked away and I thought, "Oh my god, Katie Couric just invited me to go upstairs and look at her boobs."
TD: Do you hear from a lot of celebrities who were offended by what you said?
CF: Well, never to your face. And to Matt Lauer’s credit, it’s not like he was a d**k about it.
A lot of time the people working around the celebrities are the ones who take that stuff personally because they’re all trying to justify their job and trying to anticipate potential issues. Celebrities are just like anybody else,.Maybe they’ve been skinned in their own way, and of course being on camera all the time probably makes you more vain than other people.
The way you look physically is important to your career, it’s something that’s in focus, so by sort of insulting Matt Lauer’s ankles it may have meant a little more to him than if I insulted my dad’s ankles in public.
Interview by Scott Bolohan
Staff Writer
You may not recognize the name, but Christian Finnegan is everywhere. He is the guy on VH1’s "Best Week Ever" that does the segment "What Your Purchases Say About You." He appears regularly on "The Today Show." He has his own "Comedy Central Presents" special. He hosts a game show on TV Land on Monday nights. And yes, he is Chad, the only white roommate from the infamous "Chappelle’s Show" skit, "The Mad Real World." But upon the Oct. 24 release of his first CD, "Two for Fliching," Finnegan established a firm identity as an up and coming comedian. He will appear at the Ryan Auditorium at Northwestern January 27. Finnegan called The DePaulia from a noisy New York Deli and talked about everything from his hatred of Star Jones to getting hit on by Katie Couric.
The DePaulia (TD): Are you excited for the tour?
Christian Finnegan (CF): I’m really excited about it. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. I don’t get to travel with other people very often, so I’m actually looking forward to that aspect of it as well. That, you know, I won’t just be by myself, which is usually the case.
TD: What were you like in college?
CF: I think college is a very evolutionary time for every person. It’s the last time in life when you get to reinvent yourself. In high school you might have been a band geek or you might have been this or that. But in college everyone tries to reinvent themselves as something different. Usually, after a semester or so you’ve given yourself up and people realize you really actually are a dork. That first semester of college is great when you are pretending you’re really deep or really athletic or whatever. I spent a lot of college trying to figure out who I was. That’s in a lot of ways what college is for. Most people haven’t ever lived away from home before and it’s only then they find out, "I am sort of a clean person" or "I guess I am a messy person" or "I guess I am a p**n hound" or "I guess I am an alcoholic." It’s kind of like at Chuck E. Cheese. The ball crawl, you know that big pit where they have all the balls? You can fool around and be an idiot and not worry too much about getting hurt in the safe environment. Once you get out of college, you can’t. You have to be a little more thoughtful about how you can hurt yourself (laughs).
TD: Do you think college crowds are different from your typical comedy club crowds?
CF: Yeah, they definitely are. The best audiences in the world are college audiences and the worst audiences in the world are college audiences. Sometimes you go to a school and they’ll have a beautiful theater with a really good sound system and other times you’ll go to a school and they’ll have a riser set up in the corner of the cafeteria. You’ll be performing and there’s people eating Quizno’s sandwiches during the show. Those audiences don’t tend to be very good, but it’s not their fault. Comedy requires a certain amount of ambiance. There’s a reason why the lights on the audience go out. There’s a reason why a theater has certain acoustics. Cafeteria shows just tend to be awful. But when a college crowd is great, there’s never going to be a more enthusiastic crowd. Which is great, but sometimes you have to change what you do for a college crowd. They’re kind of there for a party. They want to hear jokes and stuff, but they also want to scream "whoo." They don’t want your subtle stuff, they want you to kind of hit them in the balls.
TD: When did you know that you wanted to become a comedian?
CF: Any day now (laughs). It’s one of those things where I’d love to say I was not one of those kids who fantasized about it since I was 5 years old. Although I realize looking back, that I had all these comedy albums when I was a kid. I never really thought I should start doing it. Much more than my friends, I had Steve Martin albums and Woody Allen albums, and Eddie Murphy’s "Delirious" and all these things I was obsessed about. But I never really thought, "Hey, I want to do comedy." It was just something I liked doing. I hated stand up comedy when I was in college. My reinvention of myself in college was as a pretentious bastard. I was wearing black turtlenecks and reading philosophical books. In a lot of ways comedy was a perfect fit for me because you’re performing, but it’s your own stuff, it’s your own thoughts. I always felt that stand up comedy is a great career choice for someone who is egocentric, but has a short attention span.
TD: Do you feel pressure to be funny all the time? Do people expect you to be funny when they meet you?
CF: Only unlikable people. It does happen and I understand that. I understand that everyone likes to laugh, everyone wants to have a good time, everyone wants to hear a good joke. Everyone loves that. And so when they find out you do that for a living, I think it’s a natural impulse to want to see it in action. Like, "Come on, dazzle me!" If I told people I was a tax assessor, nobody would say "Hey, value my property." That said, it can be really fatiguing when people just want you to be funny. I can’t stand people who need to be funny all the time. A lot of people feel like they need to be the center of attention all the time, and they’re annoying ... Not everyone is a Robin Williams-type person, thank God.
TD: What do you think is the best and worst part about being a comedian?
CF: I would say the best thing is that there’s a feeling that you get; the feeling you get when you come up with an idea that you just know is going to work. When you just stumble on to a line or a premise, and it usually just happens when you're at home, at three in the morning when you’re flipping channels, or you’re on the subway and you pull a piece of paper out of your pocket and you write something and you’re like, "Oh my God." You just can’t wait to get up on stage and try it. I can’t even tell you how great a feeling that is. And secondly, the feeling that you get when it’s going well on stage, it’s so intoxicating. You really feel like you’re completely in control. I always equate it to the scene at the end of "The Matrix," when all the sudden you can see the matrix and you can stop the bullets and all that cr**. But then there’s other times when you’re on stage and you’re like, "Where am I? Who am I fooling? Why did I think people would think I was funny?" Those moments happen too. They both happen a lot.
TD: Is it tough for you to come up with jokes every week for "Best Week Ever?"
CF: It really is. I don’t mean to make it sound like it is rocket science, because it certainly ain’t, but it can be exhausting. It can be difficult, like what more do I have to say about Tara Reid? What could I possible say about the show "24" at this point?
TD: What was your favorite news story of the past year?
CF: I loathe Star Jones with such a burning passion, and so anything Star Jones-related I tend to enjoy. Not even necessarily making jokes about her, I just found it hilarious to watch. So I would say probably the whole Star Jones thing. And the Mel Gibson thing, just because it was so hilarious and weird, not just the whole anti-Semitism thing.
TD: Along the same lines, how did you feel about the Michael Richards thing as a comedian?
CF: I was troubled by this and I actually wrote about it on my Web site, which I do sometimes to figure out how I feel about something. I don’t remember who this quote is by, but I’m going to totally embarrass myself by misquoting this person and probably getting the person wrong. But I think Thoreau (note: actually E.M. Forster) had this quote, "How will I know what I think until I see what I say." The whole Michael Richards thing bothered me in a sense that, as a comedian, my initial impulse is to always defend the comic to always have the right to say what they want to say and to assume that an audience just isn’t getting it. But, in Michael Richards’ case, no. I think in the end what makes me feel like I do not need to defend him is that he is not a comedian. He’s a TV star biding his time until his next wacky neighbor role comes along. I think he was pissed and thinking people shouldn’t be talking during his set, and no comic likes it when people are talking during their set. There’s ways to deal with it and ways not to deal with it. But I thought he threw that out and that he was going to be able to get to the other side of it and make it funny. But he couldn’t because he doesn’t have the ability, because he’s not a comedian. He’s not a writer at all ... I’m not even saying that insultingly. But just because you’re good at prat falls doesn’t mean you’re good at stand up. I don’t feel like I need to defend that guy. For me, it just wasn’t him throwing out the N-word, just saying the N-word is so craven, it was all the other stuff that really was ugly ... There’s no joke there, that’s just ugly, that’s just vile, pure vile. So screw that guy, I don’t feel the need to defend that guy at all.
TD: Do you find yourself rooting for celebrities to do stupid things?
CF: What you find is you don’t have to. What I get excited about is when there are new kinds of scandals. That’s what was so great about the Mel Gibson thing, it was just so different, so weird. It’s hard to constantly make jokes about somebody getting into a catfight at a dance club. That sh** happens all the time. Sex tapes, things like that, those are done. They’re just over. But something like the Mel Gibson thing, or even something like the Michael Richards thing is just so "Wow!" and weird and out there. Those are the ones I get kind of thrilled with.
In a lot of ways, comedy can be just about button pushing. If you push the right button, people will have the physical reaction of laughing, and that’s great. You can get up and do 20 minutes of fart jokes, and Lord knows, I’m not above a fart joke. But I love a fart joke you remember two weeks down the road. That, I think, is the end goal. (Laughs) (Baby crying in the background) This baby totally needs a punch in the face.
TD: In your act you always talk about being a dork when you were younger. Do you feel that you are less dorky now that you are a comedian on TV?
CF: My life is not particularly exciting. I think a lot of times, especially in college students, you guys, and I don’t mean to sound condescending or anything, but you guys don’t remember a time before basic cable, when there was just NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox. So to me, I look at what I do on VH1 as being like AAA ball. The people who are on "CSI," those people are playing in the major leagues, and I’m basically a pickup softball game. A lot of times, college students, when you’ve grown up and had MTV your whole life, TV is TV. To a lot of you students, I might as well be on "CSI" or "Seinfeld" because they just don’t understand I’m standing in a conference room in front of a piece of colored construction paper, and not getting paid particularly well to do it. (Laughs) Of course I had some issues growing up. My story was the story of a lot of kids though. Nobody is in third grade thinking, "Man, I am so popular."
TD: Did you think the "Chappelle’s Show" skit "Mad Real World" was going to be as big as it was?
CF: I had no idea it was going to be that big. I knew it was going to be that funny. When I read the script I was just blown away. I was like, "Aw, God, I can’t believe I get to do this." A lot of "Chappelle’s Show" is like when you see one of those really great episodes of "South Park" and you just wonder, why isn’t everything this funny? I remember reading the sketch and thinking, "I can’t believe how funny this is." I got really fortunate because I bumped into Neal Brennan, who is Dave’s writing partner, when he was in the process of editing the piece before it was on the air, and at that point it was 23 minutes long.
There’s a lot of stuff that was on the cutting room floor that I wished they would put out on the DVD because it was very funny. I’ll be honest with you, that part really isn’t that far from me anyways.
That character is probably me at age 15, in terms of I certainly didn’t have a lot of experience knowing a whole lot of black people growing up in suburban Massachusetts.
I mean, I wanted to. I loved the idea of knowing black people, but I didn’t actually have any experience with it. So I was able to tap into that very easily.
TD: Do people still recognize you as Chad from the sketch?
CF: It used to be insane, not a day would go by. For a while, it was probably five times a day. And it’s never like "hey." They’ll just either yell "Chappelle" or "white boy" or "you stabbed my dad" ... There are just so many lines, "What’s the square root of this apartment?" That’s the amazing thing about that sketch is there’s probably 20 lines that people can quote that most people would know what they’re quoting. I don’t even think Dave or Neal even knew it was going to be that big.
You can never predict a pop culture phenomenon like that. I can’t even fathom it. Sometimes you’ll get people who will recognize you half way through your set and they’ll start yelling, "You stabbed my dad" or "Chappelle" and it just brings everything to a grinding halt. If anyone is coming out to the show at Northwestern, please don’t yell out "Chappelle" things. What I always tell people when I’m off stage is when they tell me, "Hey man, I was the one who yelled out ‘Chappelle,’" I’m like, "In your mind, what did you envision happening? When you yelled that out, what was the best case scenario?
What was I going to say? You know what? You’re right, "Chappelle." What then? I can’t believe you’ve actually seen ‘Chappelle’s Show.’ You must be a special person." The thing is, I don’t take it lightly ... I can’t even fathom what it was like for Dave.
Dave Chappelle is not one of those people who did stand up so he could break into the acting game. He’s a stand up who happens to have had a TV show and has been in some movies. Chris Rock is the same way. So I think that’s one of the things that really contributed to Dave just wanting to pop that balloon.
People were not letting him do what he loved to do, which is to do stand up. I can understand the urge to be like, "You know what, f**k this. I’m going to go on the lam for a year, kind of start over again and make it smaller."
I’m not saying I would have done it. I probably would have stuck with it because I’m a p***y, but I can understand why someone would want to do that.
TD: Do you have any good Matt Lauer stories?
CF: I will say that Matt Lauer is a funny dude with kind of a dark sense of humor. Off camera, he’s kind of biting. He’s a little bit of a d**k, like in the best possible way. I remember the first couple times he had a couple of insults and I was like, "Wow that was a zinger."
It’s so funny, you see these people that do these shows and you’re watching these people on TV, and you’re like, "Who are these people? They seem so dumb and so easy." If you ever are on the set of "The Today Show," I’m amazed that they’re able to do what they do. It’s really like juggling in a lot of ways, so I admire the ability to do that.
I remember one time when he interviewed Britney Spears, who was chewing gum the whole time. He was wearing loafers without socks and we were on "The Today Show" the next week. And we, especially Sherrod Small, were giving him the business about not wearing socks and how awful his ankles looked and apparently we heard back from the producers that he was a little bit insulted by that.
There was also a moment where Katie Couric sort of propositioned me sexually. It was joking, but it was a little bit creepy. They were doing a segment about mammograms, the screening for breast cancer, and Katie had a mammogram and they were showing footage from it and we were the next segment.
And Katie said something like, "I know you guys have always really wanted to see my breasts." And I made some joke like, "Oh yeah Katie, I know, it’s been weeks." And then she just looked at me dead in the eye and completely without smiling or anything was like, "Well come on up to the dressing room afterwards and we’ll see if we can change that."
She was joking, she was just being silly, but she really just held the eye contact for an awkwardly long time. And she walked away and I thought, "Oh my god, Katie Couric just invited me to go upstairs and look at her boobs."
TD: Do you hear from a lot of celebrities who were offended by what you said?
CF: Well, never to your face. And to Matt Lauer’s credit, it’s not like he was a d**k about it.
A lot of time the people working around the celebrities are the ones who take that stuff personally because they’re all trying to justify their job and trying to anticipate potential issues. Celebrities are just like anybody else,.Maybe they’ve been skinned in their own way, and of course being on camera all the time probably makes you more vain than other people.
The way you look physically is important to your career, it’s something that’s in focus, so by sort of insulting Matt Lauer’s ankles it may have meant a little more to him than if I insulted my dad’s ankles in public.
"Wincing the Night Away" Review
‘Wincing’ with The ShinsAlbum Review
by Scott Bolohan
Staff Writer
More so than most other indie bands, The Shins have defied all musical barriers. They have not only been able to reach the bearded indie kids, but also the mainstream pop fans, the emo kids with thick glasses and everyone in between. Even your parents probably like The Shins. This universal appeal has led them to become the biggest little band in the world, virtually overnight. This, combined with the three years in between their last record, has made "Wincing the Night Away" highly anticipated to say the least.
On their third release, The Shins take their sunny indie pop to new directions. The album is much darker than their past two releases. The new songs are typically melancholic at best. Instead of reproducing their old sound, The Shins seem to have used their newfound popularity to spend more time in the studio and create a complex and deeper album. But this is perhaps a welcome change for the band, who were in jeopardy of becoming predictable with their music. In fact, the best songs of the album are those that sound least like their past work.
From the opening notes of the record, it is evident that The Shins have something different in store. "Sleeping Lessons" starts with spacey keyboard vibrations and heavily distorted vocals from James Mercer, giving the song an Arcade Fire feel to it. The song slowly builds into an explosion of indie rock at its absolute best. The next track, "Australia," is a complete changeup, a song of infectious bliss, and the only really upbeat track. This is reminiscent of The Shins’ past work, a song that makes you feel good about being alive. If there was a song to change your life on this album, it would be this one.
After the completely forgetful interlude of "Pam Berry," the first single, "Phantom Limb," comes in sounding like what you would expect from The Shins, except with a noticeably melancholy feel to the song. The chorus soars as only the Shins can, particularly on lines like "This house is hardly worth the time." The song seems to drag on at the end, but it is the best fusion of old and new sounds on the album.
From there, "Wincing" takes a turn toward more experimental and decidedly darker material. "Sea Legs" has an almost hip hop beat to it, which may turn off many of the older fans. This song might show The Shins at their most creative. When the whole band chimes in to shout "sea legs" in the middle of the song, it stands as the musical apex of the album. Much in the same vein as "Sea Legs," "Split Needles" has an industrial feel to it, with a repeated drum line and looped synths. Mercer’s strong vocals make the song stand among "Wincing’s" best.
"Red Rabbits" is much slower and the heavy use of synths in the background make the song feel like it was recorded in a cave with dripping water all around. The orchestration that appears toward the end of the song is gut wrenchingly beautiful. However, the song never really reaches the expected peak. It is an interesting listen nonetheless.
The last half of the album is more of a grab bag. "Turn Me On" and "Girl Sailor" sound much alike and have The Shins in transition from their pop ditties to their new melancholy feel. This leaves the songs caught in limbo and neither end up very good. "Black Wave" is the darkest song of theirs to date. It is more of a quiet atmospheric song, with Radiohead influenced synths and acoustic guitar over a subdued Mercer’s vocals. It’s a perfect song for the iPod in the winter. The album closes out with the calm "A Comet Appears," an almost hopeful ending to an album with so many twists and turns.
While "Wincing" is by far the least accessible of The Shins records, they made some brilliant strides toward a more well-rounded sound. The fans expecting "New Slang 2" are certainly in for a surprise, but this is The Shins strongest album as a whole. With "Wincing," the Shins have created a record that pushes the boundaries of what indie pop can be.
Score:
3.5/4.0
by Scott Bolohan
Staff Writer
More so than most other indie bands, The Shins have defied all musical barriers. They have not only been able to reach the bearded indie kids, but also the mainstream pop fans, the emo kids with thick glasses and everyone in between. Even your parents probably like The Shins. This universal appeal has led them to become the biggest little band in the world, virtually overnight. This, combined with the three years in between their last record, has made "Wincing the Night Away" highly anticipated to say the least.
On their third release, The Shins take their sunny indie pop to new directions. The album is much darker than their past two releases. The new songs are typically melancholic at best. Instead of reproducing their old sound, The Shins seem to have used their newfound popularity to spend more time in the studio and create a complex and deeper album. But this is perhaps a welcome change for the band, who were in jeopardy of becoming predictable with their music. In fact, the best songs of the album are those that sound least like their past work.
From the opening notes of the record, it is evident that The Shins have something different in store. "Sleeping Lessons" starts with spacey keyboard vibrations and heavily distorted vocals from James Mercer, giving the song an Arcade Fire feel to it. The song slowly builds into an explosion of indie rock at its absolute best. The next track, "Australia," is a complete changeup, a song of infectious bliss, and the only really upbeat track. This is reminiscent of The Shins’ past work, a song that makes you feel good about being alive. If there was a song to change your life on this album, it would be this one.
After the completely forgetful interlude of "Pam Berry," the first single, "Phantom Limb," comes in sounding like what you would expect from The Shins, except with a noticeably melancholy feel to the song. The chorus soars as only the Shins can, particularly on lines like "This house is hardly worth the time." The song seems to drag on at the end, but it is the best fusion of old and new sounds on the album.
From there, "Wincing" takes a turn toward more experimental and decidedly darker material. "Sea Legs" has an almost hip hop beat to it, which may turn off many of the older fans. This song might show The Shins at their most creative. When the whole band chimes in to shout "sea legs" in the middle of the song, it stands as the musical apex of the album. Much in the same vein as "Sea Legs," "Split Needles" has an industrial feel to it, with a repeated drum line and looped synths. Mercer’s strong vocals make the song stand among "Wincing’s" best.
"Red Rabbits" is much slower and the heavy use of synths in the background make the song feel like it was recorded in a cave with dripping water all around. The orchestration that appears toward the end of the song is gut wrenchingly beautiful. However, the song never really reaches the expected peak. It is an interesting listen nonetheless.
The last half of the album is more of a grab bag. "Turn Me On" and "Girl Sailor" sound much alike and have The Shins in transition from their pop ditties to their new melancholy feel. This leaves the songs caught in limbo and neither end up very good. "Black Wave" is the darkest song of theirs to date. It is more of a quiet atmospheric song, with Radiohead influenced synths and acoustic guitar over a subdued Mercer’s vocals. It’s a perfect song for the iPod in the winter. The album closes out with the calm "A Comet Appears," an almost hopeful ending to an album with so many twists and turns.
While "Wincing" is by far the least accessible of The Shins records, they made some brilliant strides toward a more well-rounded sound. The fans expecting "New Slang 2" are certainly in for a surprise, but this is The Shins strongest album as a whole. With "Wincing," the Shins have created a record that pushes the boundaries of what indie pop can be.
Score:
3.5/4.0
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Sean Lennon Interview
Here Comes the Son
Not many people can release albums whenever they feel the time is right. But not many people are the son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono either.
In Sean Lennon’s case, the wait was well worth it. His last album, 1998’s Into the Sun, showed a young Lennon experimenting with bossa nova and giving off an uneven feel. On his latest release, Friendly Fire, named one of Rolling Stone’s top 50 albums of the year, shows a matured musician dealing with the issues of heartbreak and loss over gorgeous melancholy pop songs, recalling some of his father’s most intimate work. Lennon seems to have more of Paul McCartney’s meticulous control over every aspect of the album, as opposed to his father sitting in bed recording “Give Peace a Chance.”
“I wanted to have it be connected thematically, to be about the demise of relationships. I modeled it after like, in terms of how long it was, after Revolver in terms of the number of songs and feel. A couple other records, they all come in around 37 to 43 minutes, Pet Sounds, Revolver, Joni Mitchell, the best records do. So I wanted to make something that was conceivable in its length, because I feel like the problem with CD’s is your brains attention span tends to wane after 45 minutes. But I did intentionally make it that long, or short rather. I intentionally recorded with one band. We did all the basic tracks in 10 days so that it had a consistency.”
On Into The Sun, Lennon played every instrument, but the last eight years Lennon has spent collaborating with artists as wide ranging as Ryan Adams to Jurassic 5. On Friendly Fire, he had guest musicians, including producer Jon Brion play on a few of the tracks, who Lennon described as “how I would imagine it’s like to work with Prince. It’s like having a weird alien prodigy in your room.”
Accompanying Friendly Fire are videos for each song. Lennon called upon a couple of his friends to help him with the videos, including Lindsay Lohan, Carrie Fisher, and ex-girlfriend and inspiration for the album, Bijou Phillips. Phillips and Lennon were dating when she cheated on him with Lennon’s best friend from childhood. Before Lennon and his friend could ever reconcile, his friend died in a motorcycle accident. Although this may seem right out of a soap opera, the videos are very dream like and surreal, and put the music in a new light.
“ I wrote them, and I produced it, and I made a lot of decisions and I drew the animation myself, by hand, 600 drawings, in two weeks. We filmed the entire movie in 12 days. So yeah, I’m kind of crazy. I work a lot.”
In some of the videos Lennon is in a gravatron carnival ride, touching on an underlying theme of innocence lost.
“Well that’s exactly why I got one. We really lucked out with the gravatron we got because it was aesthetically so beautiful. I’ve been on a lot of old school gravatrons that are basically a white round room. This one was just like a spaceship and it was beautiful. Gravatrons just aren’t in demand. It only cost us like five grand for us to rent that whole fair for the day and the night. It seems like I spent millions of dollars on the videos but I just spent my regular video budget. I just make it look good by putting all the money on camera, on screen.”
With Friendly Fire, Lennon seems to be escaping the title of John and Yoko’s son and establishing himself. However, he says that being the son of a rock legend isn’t all necessarily bad. In fact, he sees it as a challenge.
“I think it’s been not great. But it’s been alright because I get a lot of people coming to my shows to see John Lennon’s kid and they leave being fans, so there are advantages… I think it was the challenge, it was the hardest thing I could do with my life, so I (became a musician).”
Lennon, like his parents, also is an artist, and his website is adorned with sketches he has made. He said that music and art are closely related, but there are some differences.
“The difference is that drawing is more introverted and music is diverted. Drawing for me is really kind of meditative and introverted, you’re alone a lot. You’re paying attention to the subtleties of the lines, the shadows. In music you’re working with people, it’s different.”
His mother, the notoriously harsh critic who is often sited as the reason the Beatles broke up, was not afraid to criticize her son’s work either.
“She liked it, it seemed like she did. I think at first she thought it was a bit too mainstream, but in the end she liked it.”
As far as plans for 2007, Lennon replied, “I’m going to be touring. Touring, touring, touring.”
This appeared in the January 12th issue of The DePaulia.
Not many people can release albums whenever they feel the time is right. But not many people are the son of John Lennon and Yoko Ono either.
In Sean Lennon’s case, the wait was well worth it. His last album, 1998’s Into the Sun, showed a young Lennon experimenting with bossa nova and giving off an uneven feel. On his latest release, Friendly Fire, named one of Rolling Stone’s top 50 albums of the year, shows a matured musician dealing with the issues of heartbreak and loss over gorgeous melancholy pop songs, recalling some of his father’s most intimate work. Lennon seems to have more of Paul McCartney’s meticulous control over every aspect of the album, as opposed to his father sitting in bed recording “Give Peace a Chance.”
“I wanted to have it be connected thematically, to be about the demise of relationships. I modeled it after like, in terms of how long it was, after Revolver in terms of the number of songs and feel. A couple other records, they all come in around 37 to 43 minutes, Pet Sounds, Revolver, Joni Mitchell, the best records do. So I wanted to make something that was conceivable in its length, because I feel like the problem with CD’s is your brains attention span tends to wane after 45 minutes. But I did intentionally make it that long, or short rather. I intentionally recorded with one band. We did all the basic tracks in 10 days so that it had a consistency.”
On Into The Sun, Lennon played every instrument, but the last eight years Lennon has spent collaborating with artists as wide ranging as Ryan Adams to Jurassic 5. On Friendly Fire, he had guest musicians, including producer Jon Brion play on a few of the tracks, who Lennon described as “how I would imagine it’s like to work with Prince. It’s like having a weird alien prodigy in your room.”
Accompanying Friendly Fire are videos for each song. Lennon called upon a couple of his friends to help him with the videos, including Lindsay Lohan, Carrie Fisher, and ex-girlfriend and inspiration for the album, Bijou Phillips. Phillips and Lennon were dating when she cheated on him with Lennon’s best friend from childhood. Before Lennon and his friend could ever reconcile, his friend died in a motorcycle accident. Although this may seem right out of a soap opera, the videos are very dream like and surreal, and put the music in a new light.
“ I wrote them, and I produced it, and I made a lot of decisions and I drew the animation myself, by hand, 600 drawings, in two weeks. We filmed the entire movie in 12 days. So yeah, I’m kind of crazy. I work a lot.”
In some of the videos Lennon is in a gravatron carnival ride, touching on an underlying theme of innocence lost.
“Well that’s exactly why I got one. We really lucked out with the gravatron we got because it was aesthetically so beautiful. I’ve been on a lot of old school gravatrons that are basically a white round room. This one was just like a spaceship and it was beautiful. Gravatrons just aren’t in demand. It only cost us like five grand for us to rent that whole fair for the day and the night. It seems like I spent millions of dollars on the videos but I just spent my regular video budget. I just make it look good by putting all the money on camera, on screen.”
With Friendly Fire, Lennon seems to be escaping the title of John and Yoko’s son and establishing himself. However, he says that being the son of a rock legend isn’t all necessarily bad. In fact, he sees it as a challenge.
“I think it’s been not great. But it’s been alright because I get a lot of people coming to my shows to see John Lennon’s kid and they leave being fans, so there are advantages… I think it was the challenge, it was the hardest thing I could do with my life, so I (became a musician).”
Lennon, like his parents, also is an artist, and his website is adorned with sketches he has made. He said that music and art are closely related, but there are some differences.
“The difference is that drawing is more introverted and music is diverted. Drawing for me is really kind of meditative and introverted, you’re alone a lot. You’re paying attention to the subtleties of the lines, the shadows. In music you’re working with people, it’s different.”
His mother, the notoriously harsh critic who is often sited as the reason the Beatles broke up, was not afraid to criticize her son’s work either.
“She liked it, it seemed like she did. I think at first she thought it was a bit too mainstream, but in the end she liked it.”
As far as plans for 2007, Lennon replied, “I’m going to be touring. Touring, touring, touring.”
This appeared in the January 12th issue of The DePaulia.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Emily Haines Interview Uncut
Haines Across America
As the frontwoman for Canada’s increasingly popular Metric, who opened for the Rolling Stones in March, Emily Haines provides catchy vocals for the danceable Canadian indie rock band. But on her first official solo release, Knives Don’t Have Your Back, Haines’ sullen piano-driven songs deal with her personal demons over the last four years she spent working on the songs. Haines, also a member of Broken Social Scene, recently had her music video for “Doctor Blind” named a top twenty-five video of the year by Pitchfork Media. Haines and her band, the Soft Skeleton, will play the Lakeshore Theater on Friday, January 12th.
D: How has the tour been going?
E: It’s been really great, I’m having a really good time, beautiful theaters, scenic theaters. We got the Tall Firs with us, which is this band I’m totally in love with. You heard them? Psychedelic folk, I’m into it. Were in Boston today, rainy Boston.
D: What’s it been like playing with a different band?
E: It’s been really, really cool. I feel really close to these guys because we spent all the time in the summer playing music. It’s been really interesting to play. I love music and I like playing with different musicians. It keeps you fresh.
D: It seems like over the last year you’ve been on the road all the time, how do you feel about touring?
E: I think Metric played, we figured it out, 250 shows last year. (Laughs). Although James Brown would play 360 so… I took time off over the holidays and I realized this is the life I want. It has its downsides, but it’s a pretty classic way of life for musicians. I didn’t invent it, the age-old troubadour who drifts from place to place playing music. I’m starting to realize that is actually my calling and the way that I feel most comfortable. We’re rollin’ in style too, so that helps.
D: What comes to mind when you think of Chicago?
E: Jim O’Rourke. I think of black-rimmed eyeglasses.
D: How was Lollapalooza?
E: It was incredible! Were you at the Broken Social Scene concert?
D: I was, it was unbelievable.
E: What the fuck, I know! And you know what was cool about that was I had been hanging out with Brendan Canning and his girlfriend Sarah in Toronto and it was just like a ridiculous summer. There was all this other shit going on, we were all really busy, and I said I felt really strongly that we should all be there, and it was really not practical. I had to fly back to Michigan to be at the 50th anniversary of my father’s high school reunion, so I was going Toronto, Chicago, Vassar and then I was going to North Carolina to rehearse with Soft Skeleton. So it was just absurd to come to Chicago for that one day and then I was so glad I did because the audience was just amazing. There was such a true connection between the band and the crowd.
D: Did you have an intention of making a solo album out of the songs?
E: I never had the experience where I was writing an album where I felt like I was writing a soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist. Once I wrote “Our Hell” the whole thing fell in place after that. A couple of songs are songs that I’ve had for a while, like “Mostly Waving,” I wrote a while back, and “Reading in Bed.” But they definitely had their place as a soundtrack, which is pretty much owing to Guy Maddin. I saw The Saddest Music in the World when I was in New York and I’ve never seen anything that was like the visual equivalent of what I wanted to do sonically. I already had it in my mind that this record was something that I needed to do, and when I saw his work it really inspired the process. I ended up tracking him down in Winnipeg at this indie film group and I got him on the phone, he was really accessible. He met me in a laundromat in Toronto and gave me a stack of videotapes to use as part of the live show. Over the past year Todor (Kobakov) and I, the guy who did the string arrangements on the record and he’s on the road with us, He and I went through and constructed this loose narrative, like visual amnion to accompany the music, but it’s a big part of the show. In answer of your question to how the record came together, it had a lot to do with being inspired by Guy Maddin.
D: I think it’s really interesting you compared it to a soundtrack because I picture driving in the snow from listening to the record.
E: Right, like a dark highway on a snowy night. Too bad we got no snow.
D: Yeah, I don’t know what that’s all about.
E: I think we do know unfortunately (laughs).
D: Would you say the new album is therapeutic for you?
E: Well, I have to write, Metric is like that as well, it’s the function of music. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, functional music, like it needs to have a real, for me at least that’s all I’ve been trying to do is really have it really serve a purpose and be like, it’s fuckin’ medicine, you know? I feel that way about Metric stuff in a different direction, like the idea of trying to force yourself not to be so insecure, to not be so analytical, and just fuckin’ play loud music, and force yourself to have a good time and not be so inhibited. And alternatively with this record, it’s like to just let a mood sit and for me to let the songs be what they are without trying to turn them into something else, because that’s usually how it works. Like with Metric I would write songs in a similar way as I wrote Knives and then I’d bring them to the band and we’d change them and do all this stuff to make them into Metric songs. But it’s definitely therapeutic to me because it’s just my favorite thing to do, just play the piano for an hour, and I get to do it every night, play with my friends, it’s good.
D: When you were younger and you were picturing yourself as an artist, did you think you would have more of a piano based sound, or a Metric based sound?
E: Yeah, it’s weird. I don’t know that I ever did. I was just always emersed in doing it which is something I’ve tried to hold on to, not being too results oriented because I realize that’s the recipe for unhappiness. At least for me, I just try to stay emersed in the process of writing or recording, so I didn’t really have a vision of myself.
D: Do you feel like you’re more comfortable with your fame?
E: It’s really weird because I don’t feel legitimately famous at all. It’s really confusing because its not like I’m fuckin’ Jennifer Aniston. Lots of people have not heard of Metric, lots of people have not heard of Broken Social Scene. It happens all the time where I go to these places and the people have no idea, which is fine, and then I’ll turn the corner and it’ll be the opposite. It’s just hard to figure out. I just go with assuming that no one knows what the hell I’m doing. The alternative is conducting yourself in such a way that you think the world gives a shit. I was raised to not really assume that anyone owes you anything. The other thing I try to think about too is there’s lots of ways, there’s celebrity and then there’s being a musician and I find celebrity really fuckin’ annoying for the most part. But I realize I don’t have to have any part of that, like there’s lots of musicians that I love their music, filmmakers, artists, I’m glad that I know them and that’s as far as it goes. I don’t need to see pictures of them in the bathroom or whatever.
D: You do make a couple references to other artists, like John Lennon’s “Love” and Neil Young’s “A Man Needs a Maid,” what made you choose them?
E: I don’t know. I never really know what I’m doing until I’ve totally done it, and even then, I’m not really sure what it is. Those are definitely two of my favorite songwriters. I think as a writer I have this thing where if I’m working on something you recognize that someone else has, what’s the best way to put it, like you could put it in quotes. I think that’s what I’m kind of doing. It’s one thing to be inspired by someone, it’s another thing to copy someone. So I think whenever I’m in my own writing whenever I come up against, you know, like when I was working on “Detective Daughter” and then I found that song kind of working its way in, I usually just acknowledge the reference, instead of trying to pretend, kind of put it in quotes, that the song has veered into that other composition.
D: Who came up with the “Doctor Blind” video idea?
E: The director is this guy Jaron Albertin who lives in England now he works there primarily, but he’s Canadian. He and I had discussed the idea of a very personal experience I’ve had many times where I seriously feel like I’m going to pass out in the giant drug stores or the giant grocery stores and just that surreal or disoriented feeling and then wanting to make it. Generally my approach with videos with Metric has been to try to make them into five minute films, so we took a really cinematic approach to it and kind of gave it this back story in our minds, like the first scene of me running to the car. We had kind of created a character for our own purposes. He came up with the whole thing of everyone falling, that’s just amazing his ability to execute an idea like that.
D: How did the rest of Metric feel about the solo album?
E: It’s been great. I think a lot of bands end up imploding because the sheer repetition of having an identity in one project and having to just everyday reinforce that one part of yourself without being able to develop the rest of your life or identity. I think that’s what I’ve seen undo a lot of people. With Metric, when we all met we all had a lot of other projects on the go and we continued that to keep the band fresh. I know for me when I wanted to make this record, I knew I wanted to make the record and I knew what I wanted it to sound like and I knew it wasn’t a Metric record. Metric’s not a vehicle, it’s not a fuckin’ Emily Haines vehicle. It’s four people, we’ve talked about it, we make music about the four of us and where we’re at, and if anybody at any point has something else they need to do, then they’re going to do it. Josh (Winstead) and Joules (Scott-Key) are recording a record right now, they have a project called Bang Lime, it’s just the two of them with Josh playing guitar and singing. Death From Above 1979 were our label mates on Last Gang, they obviously broke up which is too bad, but Jamie (Shaw) is producing Sebastien Grainger’s record, he’s the other half. The timing really worked out for everybody. Me putting out this record has meant there’s more time for all of us to do stuff. We already went into the studio a couple weeks ago to start writing the next record. Then at the end of the month we go to England to play with Bloc Party for a couple weeks and then we’re going back in (the studio). It’s been really good. That whole idea of going solo, I kind of panicked about it, that thing about not wanting to focus on results, but I knew I really wanted to make this record, and then I was like “Aw fuck, man, I got to explain this.”
D: There are so many negative connotations with going solo.
E: I know! So from the outset I really made a point of being clear with myself and everyone, that this is what it is. Everyone in the band has multiple abilities, it’s not just me. I have to keep up with them as much as they have to keep up with me.
D: Do you think you’ll be doing another solo album?
E: I already talked to Scott (Minor) and told him a lot about going farther with soundtrack instrumentation, like more orchestral stuff, so I’ll see what ideas develop. But my main priority is the next Metric record. I’m so excited about that. So no plans for another solo record yet.
D: Did you ever think about re-releasing Cut in Half and Double?
E: It’s a little funny to me, the whole internet age. In another time no one would have ever found that music. I don’t even think I have a copy, like it wasn’t even released, I made a hundred copies for my friends and family and it’s so amazing that people have found it and are listening to it. I feel like it was so long ago that I don’t think I would re-release it. I’m glad people are digging it, it’s funny. It’s like my little sister or something that made that record.
D: Do you have New Year’s resolutions?
E: Less email (laughs).
An exerpt of this appeared in the January 12th issue of The DePaulia
As the frontwoman for Canada’s increasingly popular Metric, who opened for the Rolling Stones in March, Emily Haines provides catchy vocals for the danceable Canadian indie rock band. But on her first official solo release, Knives Don’t Have Your Back, Haines’ sullen piano-driven songs deal with her personal demons over the last four years she spent working on the songs. Haines, also a member of Broken Social Scene, recently had her music video for “Doctor Blind” named a top twenty-five video of the year by Pitchfork Media. Haines and her band, the Soft Skeleton, will play the Lakeshore Theater on Friday, January 12th.
D: How has the tour been going?
E: It’s been really great, I’m having a really good time, beautiful theaters, scenic theaters. We got the Tall Firs with us, which is this band I’m totally in love with. You heard them? Psychedelic folk, I’m into it. Were in Boston today, rainy Boston.
D: What’s it been like playing with a different band?
E: It’s been really, really cool. I feel really close to these guys because we spent all the time in the summer playing music. It’s been really interesting to play. I love music and I like playing with different musicians. It keeps you fresh.
D: It seems like over the last year you’ve been on the road all the time, how do you feel about touring?
E: I think Metric played, we figured it out, 250 shows last year. (Laughs). Although James Brown would play 360 so… I took time off over the holidays and I realized this is the life I want. It has its downsides, but it’s a pretty classic way of life for musicians. I didn’t invent it, the age-old troubadour who drifts from place to place playing music. I’m starting to realize that is actually my calling and the way that I feel most comfortable. We’re rollin’ in style too, so that helps.
D: What comes to mind when you think of Chicago?
E: Jim O’Rourke. I think of black-rimmed eyeglasses.
D: How was Lollapalooza?
E: It was incredible! Were you at the Broken Social Scene concert?
D: I was, it was unbelievable.
E: What the fuck, I know! And you know what was cool about that was I had been hanging out with Brendan Canning and his girlfriend Sarah in Toronto and it was just like a ridiculous summer. There was all this other shit going on, we were all really busy, and I said I felt really strongly that we should all be there, and it was really not practical. I had to fly back to Michigan to be at the 50th anniversary of my father’s high school reunion, so I was going Toronto, Chicago, Vassar and then I was going to North Carolina to rehearse with Soft Skeleton. So it was just absurd to come to Chicago for that one day and then I was so glad I did because the audience was just amazing. There was such a true connection between the band and the crowd.
D: Did you have an intention of making a solo album out of the songs?
E: I never had the experience where I was writing an album where I felt like I was writing a soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist. Once I wrote “Our Hell” the whole thing fell in place after that. A couple of songs are songs that I’ve had for a while, like “Mostly Waving,” I wrote a while back, and “Reading in Bed.” But they definitely had their place as a soundtrack, which is pretty much owing to Guy Maddin. I saw The Saddest Music in the World when I was in New York and I’ve never seen anything that was like the visual equivalent of what I wanted to do sonically. I already had it in my mind that this record was something that I needed to do, and when I saw his work it really inspired the process. I ended up tracking him down in Winnipeg at this indie film group and I got him on the phone, he was really accessible. He met me in a laundromat in Toronto and gave me a stack of videotapes to use as part of the live show. Over the past year Todor (Kobakov) and I, the guy who did the string arrangements on the record and he’s on the road with us, He and I went through and constructed this loose narrative, like visual amnion to accompany the music, but it’s a big part of the show. In answer of your question to how the record came together, it had a lot to do with being inspired by Guy Maddin.
D: I think it’s really interesting you compared it to a soundtrack because I picture driving in the snow from listening to the record.
E: Right, like a dark highway on a snowy night. Too bad we got no snow.
D: Yeah, I don’t know what that’s all about.
E: I think we do know unfortunately (laughs).
D: Would you say the new album is therapeutic for you?
E: Well, I have to write, Metric is like that as well, it’s the function of music. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, functional music, like it needs to have a real, for me at least that’s all I’ve been trying to do is really have it really serve a purpose and be like, it’s fuckin’ medicine, you know? I feel that way about Metric stuff in a different direction, like the idea of trying to force yourself not to be so insecure, to not be so analytical, and just fuckin’ play loud music, and force yourself to have a good time and not be so inhibited. And alternatively with this record, it’s like to just let a mood sit and for me to let the songs be what they are without trying to turn them into something else, because that’s usually how it works. Like with Metric I would write songs in a similar way as I wrote Knives and then I’d bring them to the band and we’d change them and do all this stuff to make them into Metric songs. But it’s definitely therapeutic to me because it’s just my favorite thing to do, just play the piano for an hour, and I get to do it every night, play with my friends, it’s good.
D: When you were younger and you were picturing yourself as an artist, did you think you would have more of a piano based sound, or a Metric based sound?
E: Yeah, it’s weird. I don’t know that I ever did. I was just always emersed in doing it which is something I’ve tried to hold on to, not being too results oriented because I realize that’s the recipe for unhappiness. At least for me, I just try to stay emersed in the process of writing or recording, so I didn’t really have a vision of myself.
D: Do you feel like you’re more comfortable with your fame?
E: It’s really weird because I don’t feel legitimately famous at all. It’s really confusing because its not like I’m fuckin’ Jennifer Aniston. Lots of people have not heard of Metric, lots of people have not heard of Broken Social Scene. It happens all the time where I go to these places and the people have no idea, which is fine, and then I’ll turn the corner and it’ll be the opposite. It’s just hard to figure out. I just go with assuming that no one knows what the hell I’m doing. The alternative is conducting yourself in such a way that you think the world gives a shit. I was raised to not really assume that anyone owes you anything. The other thing I try to think about too is there’s lots of ways, there’s celebrity and then there’s being a musician and I find celebrity really fuckin’ annoying for the most part. But I realize I don’t have to have any part of that, like there’s lots of musicians that I love their music, filmmakers, artists, I’m glad that I know them and that’s as far as it goes. I don’t need to see pictures of them in the bathroom or whatever.
D: You do make a couple references to other artists, like John Lennon’s “Love” and Neil Young’s “A Man Needs a Maid,” what made you choose them?
E: I don’t know. I never really know what I’m doing until I’ve totally done it, and even then, I’m not really sure what it is. Those are definitely two of my favorite songwriters. I think as a writer I have this thing where if I’m working on something you recognize that someone else has, what’s the best way to put it, like you could put it in quotes. I think that’s what I’m kind of doing. It’s one thing to be inspired by someone, it’s another thing to copy someone. So I think whenever I’m in my own writing whenever I come up against, you know, like when I was working on “Detective Daughter” and then I found that song kind of working its way in, I usually just acknowledge the reference, instead of trying to pretend, kind of put it in quotes, that the song has veered into that other composition.
D: Who came up with the “Doctor Blind” video idea?
E: The director is this guy Jaron Albertin who lives in England now he works there primarily, but he’s Canadian. He and I had discussed the idea of a very personal experience I’ve had many times where I seriously feel like I’m going to pass out in the giant drug stores or the giant grocery stores and just that surreal or disoriented feeling and then wanting to make it. Generally my approach with videos with Metric has been to try to make them into five minute films, so we took a really cinematic approach to it and kind of gave it this back story in our minds, like the first scene of me running to the car. We had kind of created a character for our own purposes. He came up with the whole thing of everyone falling, that’s just amazing his ability to execute an idea like that.
D: How did the rest of Metric feel about the solo album?
E: It’s been great. I think a lot of bands end up imploding because the sheer repetition of having an identity in one project and having to just everyday reinforce that one part of yourself without being able to develop the rest of your life or identity. I think that’s what I’ve seen undo a lot of people. With Metric, when we all met we all had a lot of other projects on the go and we continued that to keep the band fresh. I know for me when I wanted to make this record, I knew I wanted to make the record and I knew what I wanted it to sound like and I knew it wasn’t a Metric record. Metric’s not a vehicle, it’s not a fuckin’ Emily Haines vehicle. It’s four people, we’ve talked about it, we make music about the four of us and where we’re at, and if anybody at any point has something else they need to do, then they’re going to do it. Josh (Winstead) and Joules (Scott-Key) are recording a record right now, they have a project called Bang Lime, it’s just the two of them with Josh playing guitar and singing. Death From Above 1979 were our label mates on Last Gang, they obviously broke up which is too bad, but Jamie (Shaw) is producing Sebastien Grainger’s record, he’s the other half. The timing really worked out for everybody. Me putting out this record has meant there’s more time for all of us to do stuff. We already went into the studio a couple weeks ago to start writing the next record. Then at the end of the month we go to England to play with Bloc Party for a couple weeks and then we’re going back in (the studio). It’s been really good. That whole idea of going solo, I kind of panicked about it, that thing about not wanting to focus on results, but I knew I really wanted to make this record, and then I was like “Aw fuck, man, I got to explain this.”
D: There are so many negative connotations with going solo.
E: I know! So from the outset I really made a point of being clear with myself and everyone, that this is what it is. Everyone in the band has multiple abilities, it’s not just me. I have to keep up with them as much as they have to keep up with me.
D: Do you think you’ll be doing another solo album?
E: I already talked to Scott (Minor) and told him a lot about going farther with soundtrack instrumentation, like more orchestral stuff, so I’ll see what ideas develop. But my main priority is the next Metric record. I’m so excited about that. So no plans for another solo record yet.
D: Did you ever think about re-releasing Cut in Half and Double?
E: It’s a little funny to me, the whole internet age. In another time no one would have ever found that music. I don’t even think I have a copy, like it wasn’t even released, I made a hundred copies for my friends and family and it’s so amazing that people have found it and are listening to it. I feel like it was so long ago that I don’t think I would re-release it. I’m glad people are digging it, it’s funny. It’s like my little sister or something that made that record.
D: Do you have New Year’s resolutions?
E: Less email (laughs).
An exerpt of this appeared in the January 12th issue of The DePaulia
Sunday, January 7, 2007
McScrewed
On Tuesday Cal Ripken Jr. and Tony Gwynn were elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame with some of the highest percentages of votes of all time. Two excellent ballplayers that by anyone’s definition were Hall-worthy. But the elephant, or rather muscle bound redhead, in the room was completely screwed.
In the late 1990’s, there was no more exciting player to watch than Mark McGwire. His home runs were moonshots, and at any at bat, he was liable to launch one again. In 1998, his (along with that Sosa guy’s) chase of Roger Maris’ home run record captivated the world. After finishing with a record 70 home runs, McGwire reached a status that few athletes, or people for that matter, have ever reached. There was no player more marketable, and Major League Baseball was thrilled to use a hero like McGwire to help people forget about the long strike that crippled the game a few years before. In fact, he was awarded with the Lou Gehrig Memorial Award, for his numerous charitable work, which is awarded to the player “who best exemplify character and integrity on and off the field.” Now McGwire is seen as a real like Lex Luther. Funny how the times change.
Flash forward nine years later, after McGwire’s career was over, a career that saw him win Rookie of the Year, be elected to twelve All Star Games, have a ratio of 10.6 at bats per home run, the greatest in the history of baseball, and finish with 583 home runs, the seventh best all-time. So how could such a phenomenal baseball player finish with 23.1% of voters picking him for the Hall of Fame when 75% is needed? There are a number of answers to this: a book by a former teammate which labeled him as a steroid user, an embarrassing appearance before Congress where he famously ‘refused to talk about the past,’ and perhaps most of all, the shift of public opinion that made steroids the 8th deadly sin.
It’s probable that Mark McGwire did use steroids, and steroids are really not good for the game of baseball or anyone. But the problem is that baseball let it become a part of its sport. Owners and the head honchos of Major League Baseball loved the home run chase and the increase in popularity in the sport that followed it. Baseball writers, the people that vote for the Hall of Fame, did nothing to dig deeper into a possible steroid problem that now evidently played a big role in their decision not to vote McGwire into the Hall, and really, the writers have no one else to look at for allowing this to happen. So now, and once only pressure was applied to baseball, are they taking a stance against steroids.
Now everyone wants to play revisionist history and discredit what happened in the ‘90’s as the “steroid era.” But the problem with this is you really can’t just ignore an entire decade of baseball. People would love to pretend that everyone was clean and only a select few were doing steroids, but the test results have shown otherwise. There have been more pitchers than hitters caught with steroids, and one of the first hitters caught was Alex Sanchez, all 5’10”, 179 lbs of him, with a whopping six home runs over his five year career. The point is that you really can’t say who was using steroids, or that the hitters using steroids weren’t facing pitching also on the juice.
The way that Cal Ripken and Tony Gywnn could waltz into the Hall of Fame while Mark McGwire is picked on because he hit big home runs and wasn’t better prepared to face Congress is also questionable. To say Ripken or Gwynn never used steroids is something that you really can’t be certain of. People just liked them more; they had good personalities and were never confronted about the issue under oath. Take Ripken for example. He was so determined to help his team that he played in a record 2,632 games with broken bones and many other ailments. Eventually he took pride in his streak and refused to sit. Who’s to say that he wouldn’t have taken steroids to help recover from an injury and keep his streak alive? No one can 100% say he didn’t. When you start picking and choosing like this, there is a problem.
McGwire was just the first player that will face the scrutiny of the voters after spending much of his career in the ‘90’s. When other Hall-worthy players like Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, and Rafael Palmeiro come up for election, they will problem face the same trouble getting in. What about players like Roger Clemens and Albert Pujols who there have been whispers about possible steroid use, but no one wants to believe it? Baseball writers, who are turning more and more into moral preachers everyday, have made up their mind: they’ll vote for the ones that were nice to them and popular with the fans while ignoring the facts that a great deal of them were probably using steroids.
McGwire, one of baseball’s truly legendary sluggers, may not ever make it to the Hall of Fame without ever been convicted of anything or admitting to any wrongdoing. He’s being treated like a witch in Salem because he may have done something, but also may not have. The Hall of Fame will someday soon not have many of the best players in baseball history inducted into its hallowed grounds. And does that make the Hall of Fame any more legitimate than if they let in player who may have used steroids?
Baseball needs to accept its past and let McGwire in. Plus it would do wonders for my 1985 Topps Mark McGwire rookie card.
In the late 1990’s, there was no more exciting player to watch than Mark McGwire. His home runs were moonshots, and at any at bat, he was liable to launch one again. In 1998, his (along with that Sosa guy’s) chase of Roger Maris’ home run record captivated the world. After finishing with a record 70 home runs, McGwire reached a status that few athletes, or people for that matter, have ever reached. There was no player more marketable, and Major League Baseball was thrilled to use a hero like McGwire to help people forget about the long strike that crippled the game a few years before. In fact, he was awarded with the Lou Gehrig Memorial Award, for his numerous charitable work, which is awarded to the player “who best exemplify character and integrity on and off the field.” Now McGwire is seen as a real like Lex Luther. Funny how the times change.
Flash forward nine years later, after McGwire’s career was over, a career that saw him win Rookie of the Year, be elected to twelve All Star Games, have a ratio of 10.6 at bats per home run, the greatest in the history of baseball, and finish with 583 home runs, the seventh best all-time. So how could such a phenomenal baseball player finish with 23.1% of voters picking him for the Hall of Fame when 75% is needed? There are a number of answers to this: a book by a former teammate which labeled him as a steroid user, an embarrassing appearance before Congress where he famously ‘refused to talk about the past,’ and perhaps most of all, the shift of public opinion that made steroids the 8th deadly sin.
It’s probable that Mark McGwire did use steroids, and steroids are really not good for the game of baseball or anyone. But the problem is that baseball let it become a part of its sport. Owners and the head honchos of Major League Baseball loved the home run chase and the increase in popularity in the sport that followed it. Baseball writers, the people that vote for the Hall of Fame, did nothing to dig deeper into a possible steroid problem that now evidently played a big role in their decision not to vote McGwire into the Hall, and really, the writers have no one else to look at for allowing this to happen. So now, and once only pressure was applied to baseball, are they taking a stance against steroids.
Now everyone wants to play revisionist history and discredit what happened in the ‘90’s as the “steroid era.” But the problem with this is you really can’t just ignore an entire decade of baseball. People would love to pretend that everyone was clean and only a select few were doing steroids, but the test results have shown otherwise. There have been more pitchers than hitters caught with steroids, and one of the first hitters caught was Alex Sanchez, all 5’10”, 179 lbs of him, with a whopping six home runs over his five year career. The point is that you really can’t say who was using steroids, or that the hitters using steroids weren’t facing pitching also on the juice.
The way that Cal Ripken and Tony Gywnn could waltz into the Hall of Fame while Mark McGwire is picked on because he hit big home runs and wasn’t better prepared to face Congress is also questionable. To say Ripken or Gwynn never used steroids is something that you really can’t be certain of. People just liked them more; they had good personalities and were never confronted about the issue under oath. Take Ripken for example. He was so determined to help his team that he played in a record 2,632 games with broken bones and many other ailments. Eventually he took pride in his streak and refused to sit. Who’s to say that he wouldn’t have taken steroids to help recover from an injury and keep his streak alive? No one can 100% say he didn’t. When you start picking and choosing like this, there is a problem.
McGwire was just the first player that will face the scrutiny of the voters after spending much of his career in the ‘90’s. When other Hall-worthy players like Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, and Rafael Palmeiro come up for election, they will problem face the same trouble getting in. What about players like Roger Clemens and Albert Pujols who there have been whispers about possible steroid use, but no one wants to believe it? Baseball writers, who are turning more and more into moral preachers everyday, have made up their mind: they’ll vote for the ones that were nice to them and popular with the fans while ignoring the facts that a great deal of them were probably using steroids.
McGwire, one of baseball’s truly legendary sluggers, may not ever make it to the Hall of Fame without ever been convicted of anything or admitting to any wrongdoing. He’s being treated like a witch in Salem because he may have done something, but also may not have. The Hall of Fame will someday soon not have many of the best players in baseball history inducted into its hallowed grounds. And does that make the Hall of Fame any more legitimate than if they let in player who may have used steroids?
Baseball needs to accept its past and let McGwire in. Plus it would do wonders for my 1985 Topps Mark McGwire rookie card.
Monday, December 4, 2006
Sean Lennon Interview, Cut Parts
Instead of having these questions go to waste, I thought I would publish them here, there are still some interesting parts, although the best parts were put into the article.
Scott Bolohan: How has the tour been going?
Sean Lennon: Really, really great actually. I only have one show tonight in Seattle before I take a break. It’s our last show tonight and it’s been really fun.
SB: What’s been your favorite song to perform?
SL: Probably “Would I be the One” and “Falling Out of Love.”
SB: Why’s that?
SL: Because they have some really, like, rockin’ sections in the outro that are fun to play.
SB: What’s the best concert that you’ve ever personally attended?
SL: Probably Pink Floyd The Wall, when I was really young, that famous tour when they had the painting? stuff that came down in the back of Madison Square Garden, you know, all the special effects and stuff. It was awesome.
SB: After you’ve been collaborating with other artists for many years, what made you come back to make your solo album?
SL: I don’t know. Things just came together. It just kind of organically evolved, naturally. I don’t know what made me do it. It’s not like I didn’t have songs before, I could have been making records every two years. I didn’t want to for some reason, and then for whatever reason I had the right circumstances, right people around, and it just felt right and it just happened, and now I have one.
SB: In the future, do you think you’ll be releasing albums on a more regular basis?
SL: I hope so. I’m not sure, but I’d like that to be the case.
SB: Did you have to learn how to fence for the video?
SL: Yes I did.
SB: With people like you and Beck using video to accompany the album, do you see this as a direction that music is going, especially in the age of music piracy?
SL: I kind of feel like visualism and audio are going to merge even more in the future simply because of technology.
SB: Is there a relationship between your art and your music?
SL: Yeah, of course.
SB: Many people start bands to meet girls, make money, or get famous, what drew you into music?
SL: Definitely not that. I think it was the challenge, it was the hardest thing I could do with my life, so I did it.
SB: Did you have any formal training in music?
SL: No, I was self taught.
SB: Bands like the Rolling Stones and Brian Wilson are in their 60’s and still making music and touring, do you see yourself still doing music when you’re in your 60’s?
SL: Well, yeah. I just hope I make it to being old, it’s kind of thinking far ahead, but yeah I don’t want to look like an idiot when I’m playing new songs.
SB: Any plans for 2007?
SL: I’m going to be touring. Touring, touring, touring.
Scott Bolohan: How has the tour been going?
Sean Lennon: Really, really great actually. I only have one show tonight in Seattle before I take a break. It’s our last show tonight and it’s been really fun.
SB: What’s been your favorite song to perform?
SL: Probably “Would I be the One” and “Falling Out of Love.”
SB: Why’s that?
SL: Because they have some really, like, rockin’ sections in the outro that are fun to play.
SB: What’s the best concert that you’ve ever personally attended?
SL: Probably Pink Floyd The Wall, when I was really young, that famous tour when they had the painting? stuff that came down in the back of Madison Square Garden, you know, all the special effects and stuff. It was awesome.
SB: After you’ve been collaborating with other artists for many years, what made you come back to make your solo album?
SL: I don’t know. Things just came together. It just kind of organically evolved, naturally. I don’t know what made me do it. It’s not like I didn’t have songs before, I could have been making records every two years. I didn’t want to for some reason, and then for whatever reason I had the right circumstances, right people around, and it just felt right and it just happened, and now I have one.
SB: In the future, do you think you’ll be releasing albums on a more regular basis?
SL: I hope so. I’m not sure, but I’d like that to be the case.
SB: Did you have to learn how to fence for the video?
SL: Yes I did.
SB: With people like you and Beck using video to accompany the album, do you see this as a direction that music is going, especially in the age of music piracy?
SL: I kind of feel like visualism and audio are going to merge even more in the future simply because of technology.
SB: Is there a relationship between your art and your music?
SL: Yeah, of course.
SB: Many people start bands to meet girls, make money, or get famous, what drew you into music?
SL: Definitely not that. I think it was the challenge, it was the hardest thing I could do with my life, so I did it.
SB: Did you have any formal training in music?
SL: No, I was self taught.
SB: Bands like the Rolling Stones and Brian Wilson are in their 60’s and still making music and touring, do you see yourself still doing music when you’re in your 60’s?
SL: Well, yeah. I just hope I make it to being old, it’s kind of thinking far ahead, but yeah I don’t want to look like an idiot when I’m playing new songs.
SB: Any plans for 2007?
SL: I’m going to be touring. Touring, touring, touring.
Sunday, November 19, 2006
Wolfmother Interview
This is my interview with Chis Heskett, the drummer of Wolfmother. It will probably be appearing in an upcoming issue of The DePaulia.
S: How’s the tour been going?
W: Great, it’s been cool. We played new states and the crowds have been awesome. Excellent.
S: Did you guys do anything for Thanksgiving?
W: Not really, we kind of had a day off and everything was shut which mean we could sleep. We were in New York and we went to friend’s house and he cooked a vegetarian Thanksgiving feast, it was great. We didn’t get a turkey but it was still really good.
S: Was it your first Thanksgiving?
W: Yeah! We gave thanks.
S: What’s your favorite animal?
W: (Pause) um, I like dogs.
S: Dogs? Did the other guys want it to be Wolfmother and you wanted it to be Dogmother?
W: Yeah (laughs)
S: What is it about wolves that make it so popular for band names, like Wolf Eyes and Wolf Parade?
W: I don’t know, I’m not sure. There’s a bunch of bands in Australia that have wolf names as well that we didn’t know about either. I think there’s something in the water. I’m not sure, I guess it’s a cool animal.
S: It is pretty cool, yeah.
W: Sounds cool (laughs).
S: I think last time you were here was for Lollapalooza. How was that?
W: That was amazing, that was great. Perry Ferrell came up and met us before we went onstage.
S: What is he like?
W: He was great, he was very cool, he was like when he was announcing us, he gave a little speech, he was like ‘combing the past and the future!’ ????
S: I was actually at the show, I saw you guys it was really cool. Did you get to see any other bands there?
W: Um, we saw um, um we really didn’t get to see a lot. We saw Gnarls Barkley, we didn’t get to see too much other than when we were walking around. I love that festival, such a cool spot.
S: It’s so cool with the city in the background.
W: And the water on the other side. It’s cool.
S: What’s a typical day on tour like for you?
W: It depends what were doing. At the moment were on the bus, which is coo. You wake up and then you’re in the next city. Kind of wander around, get something to eat, sound check, hang around waiting, play the show and get back on the bus.
S: Do you get sick of the other band members?
W: Oh yeah, we all get sick of each other. (Shouts in the background) (Laughs).
S: What’s your favorite song to play live?
W: Um, um, um I like Pyramid and Joker and the Thief, it changes from night to night.
S: Do you get tired of playing the same songs every night?
W: Sometimes, we’ve been playing them over and over again. You do, it’s only like every now and then. (Laughs)
S: Speaking of Joker and the Thief, what was it like working with the Jackass guys?
W: They flew out to Sydney to film it, it was filmed over two hometown shows, we had two sold out shows in Sydney and they just came and hung out and filmed around backstage. They had their own band room, it was like a circus, it was amazing.
S: Did they try to get you guys to do any stunts?
W: Wee-man kind of leap out from underneath the couch I was on once and tried to get me in the nuts. That was about it, they were super cool guys, they were hilarious. It was kind of like when you’re crazy and the rest of the weekend you freak out. But then when they go you miss them. They’re like constant amusement at all times. You pass their van and it would smell like vomit and they’d drink all your beer and they were beating each other up all the time, it was great.
S: What was it like introducing Led Zepplin to the UK Hall of Fame?
W: Aw man, that was the most high pressured, scariest night of my life. There were so many big wigs there like Jimmy Page, who was there to get inducted and accept the award. Tony Iamai from Black Sabbath, David Gilmour, Brian Wilson, George Martin, Prince, Beyonce, Bon Jovi, they were all there and watching. We had to play a Led Zepplin song and I fucked up the start of it, it was scary. (Laughs) It was cool.
S: Did you get to meet any of those guys?
W: Not really, I was a bit scared.
S: Everyone always says that your influenced by people like Zepplin, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, what kind of music do you actually listen to?
W: I guess that we do listen to that stuff, but it’s one tiny little sliver of what we listen to. I like psychedelic music, kind of everything from the ‘60’s up to now. I like jazz and hip hop and rock. There’s good stuff in all the genres.
S: What was the last CD you bought?
W: I bought Small Faces but I haven’t really listened to it, Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake or something. It’s like an old ‘60’s album.
S: What is it about Wolfmother that appeals to such a large audience?
W: I don’t know, it’s pretty straightforward rock music, so I guess its accessible. When we started we played in little clubs around Sydney and we had these biker dudes with black hair at the show freaking out and also really young people. I guess because it does have an old school sound so people that were around in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s can access us right away, they know what it’s all about, and also young kids who have never heard it before can get into it for the first time.
S: How do the crowds in America compare to the Australian ones?
W: They’re pretty close, I think rock crowd are pretty similar around the world. I think its different city to city rather than country to country. I think the real major cities the crowds are more relaxed. All the shows here have been amazing, we’ve had such a great response. Once the people get to know the music better after the album has been out for a while it get better.
S: What’s something Americans don’t know about Australia?
W: I don’t know. (Laughs) I think there’s funny TV footage that shows America doesn’t know much about anywhere but America (Laughs). But that’s really generalizing (laughs). I haven’t done any surveys, I should get a video camera out and start interviewing our fans.
S: What do you consider to be the highlight of your career so far?
W: I think just getting the copy of the album for the first time, getting the finished product that’s been imprinted enmarked and getting a copy on vinyl. Getting a copy on double vinyl, that’s alright for me, that’s what it’s all about, that the finished product.
S: Since you released the EP in 2004, you’ve become pretty big pretty quick, do you think you’ve “made it?”
W: I don’t know what that means really, I don’t know. What do you mean ‘made it?’
S: Do you feel like this is what you always wanted to do and now you did it?
W: Yeah, I guess so, to be in a band touring the world, recording music, I guess we have made it, we’re playing music full time, we don’t have other jobs, we’re traveling around the world. So yeah, for me, this is a dream come true.
S: Is this what you wanted to do when you were a kid?
W: Yeah, but it’s something you never thought you could, to me it’s always been this kind of magic thing that you want to be part of but you don’t really know how. I guess we just spent a lot of time jamming and discovered music and how to play music. I think it’s something we’ve always wanted to do. It’s like a childhood dream really. I remember I used to sit in school and draw guitars and bands and hair bands, metal bands.
S: I read that you designed the cover of the debut album…
W: No, no I didn’t, the first EP in Australia I designed the cover, it was like a white cover with a triangle, kind of psychedelic volcanoes looking thing, it was actually Frank Frenzetta who designed that, so I can’t take credit for that because its incredible.
S: So your not still doing design anymore?
W: I think music has kind of taken over, when we had a lot of time, when we were starting out, I kind of had a lot of things going on. The music has kind of taken over. Maybe in the future. (Laughs)
S: What do you have planned for 2007?
W: I’m not sure yet, I’m not sure. Management wants to tour our asses off again. Our manager was saying that bands put in all the groundwork and they tour their asses off, especially bands from Australia because its so far, you have to work a lot harder. You put in all this ground work and play so many shows and by the time it gets kind of playing the shows where you get the big money, hopefully we can pace ourselves, not go insane.
S: Do you think you guys will work on any new material?
W: Yeah, we just kind of started to, it’s cool, especially when you’ve been playing the same songs every night. But yeah, we’ve been jamming, it’s exciting, it’s fun.
S: How’s the tour been going?
W: Great, it’s been cool. We played new states and the crowds have been awesome. Excellent.
S: Did you guys do anything for Thanksgiving?
W: Not really, we kind of had a day off and everything was shut which mean we could sleep. We were in New York and we went to friend’s house and he cooked a vegetarian Thanksgiving feast, it was great. We didn’t get a turkey but it was still really good.
S: Was it your first Thanksgiving?
W: Yeah! We gave thanks.
S: What’s your favorite animal?
W: (Pause) um, I like dogs.
S: Dogs? Did the other guys want it to be Wolfmother and you wanted it to be Dogmother?
W: Yeah (laughs)
S: What is it about wolves that make it so popular for band names, like Wolf Eyes and Wolf Parade?
W: I don’t know, I’m not sure. There’s a bunch of bands in Australia that have wolf names as well that we didn’t know about either. I think there’s something in the water. I’m not sure, I guess it’s a cool animal.
S: It is pretty cool, yeah.
W: Sounds cool (laughs).
S: I think last time you were here was for Lollapalooza. How was that?
W: That was amazing, that was great. Perry Ferrell came up and met us before we went onstage.
S: What is he like?
W: He was great, he was very cool, he was like when he was announcing us, he gave a little speech, he was like ‘combing the past and the future!’ ????
S: I was actually at the show, I saw you guys it was really cool. Did you get to see any other bands there?
W: Um, we saw um, um we really didn’t get to see a lot. We saw Gnarls Barkley, we didn’t get to see too much other than when we were walking around. I love that festival, such a cool spot.
S: It’s so cool with the city in the background.
W: And the water on the other side. It’s cool.
S: What’s a typical day on tour like for you?
W: It depends what were doing. At the moment were on the bus, which is coo. You wake up and then you’re in the next city. Kind of wander around, get something to eat, sound check, hang around waiting, play the show and get back on the bus.
S: Do you get sick of the other band members?
W: Oh yeah, we all get sick of each other. (Shouts in the background) (Laughs).
S: What’s your favorite song to play live?
W: Um, um, um I like Pyramid and Joker and the Thief, it changes from night to night.
S: Do you get tired of playing the same songs every night?
W: Sometimes, we’ve been playing them over and over again. You do, it’s only like every now and then. (Laughs)
S: Speaking of Joker and the Thief, what was it like working with the Jackass guys?
W: They flew out to Sydney to film it, it was filmed over two hometown shows, we had two sold out shows in Sydney and they just came and hung out and filmed around backstage. They had their own band room, it was like a circus, it was amazing.
S: Did they try to get you guys to do any stunts?
W: Wee-man kind of leap out from underneath the couch I was on once and tried to get me in the nuts. That was about it, they were super cool guys, they were hilarious. It was kind of like when you’re crazy and the rest of the weekend you freak out. But then when they go you miss them. They’re like constant amusement at all times. You pass their van and it would smell like vomit and they’d drink all your beer and they were beating each other up all the time, it was great.
S: What was it like introducing Led Zepplin to the UK Hall of Fame?
W: Aw man, that was the most high pressured, scariest night of my life. There were so many big wigs there like Jimmy Page, who was there to get inducted and accept the award. Tony Iamai from Black Sabbath, David Gilmour, Brian Wilson, George Martin, Prince, Beyonce, Bon Jovi, they were all there and watching. We had to play a Led Zepplin song and I fucked up the start of it, it was scary. (Laughs) It was cool.
S: Did you get to meet any of those guys?
W: Not really, I was a bit scared.
S: Everyone always says that your influenced by people like Zepplin, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, what kind of music do you actually listen to?
W: I guess that we do listen to that stuff, but it’s one tiny little sliver of what we listen to. I like psychedelic music, kind of everything from the ‘60’s up to now. I like jazz and hip hop and rock. There’s good stuff in all the genres.
S: What was the last CD you bought?
W: I bought Small Faces but I haven’t really listened to it, Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake or something. It’s like an old ‘60’s album.
S: What is it about Wolfmother that appeals to such a large audience?
W: I don’t know, it’s pretty straightforward rock music, so I guess its accessible. When we started we played in little clubs around Sydney and we had these biker dudes with black hair at the show freaking out and also really young people. I guess because it does have an old school sound so people that were around in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s can access us right away, they know what it’s all about, and also young kids who have never heard it before can get into it for the first time.
S: How do the crowds in America compare to the Australian ones?
W: They’re pretty close, I think rock crowd are pretty similar around the world. I think its different city to city rather than country to country. I think the real major cities the crowds are more relaxed. All the shows here have been amazing, we’ve had such a great response. Once the people get to know the music better after the album has been out for a while it get better.
S: What’s something Americans don’t know about Australia?
W: I don’t know. (Laughs) I think there’s funny TV footage that shows America doesn’t know much about anywhere but America (Laughs). But that’s really generalizing (laughs). I haven’t done any surveys, I should get a video camera out and start interviewing our fans.
S: What do you consider to be the highlight of your career so far?
W: I think just getting the copy of the album for the first time, getting the finished product that’s been imprinted enmarked and getting a copy on vinyl. Getting a copy on double vinyl, that’s alright for me, that’s what it’s all about, that the finished product.
S: Since you released the EP in 2004, you’ve become pretty big pretty quick, do you think you’ve “made it?”
W: I don’t know what that means really, I don’t know. What do you mean ‘made it?’
S: Do you feel like this is what you always wanted to do and now you did it?
W: Yeah, I guess so, to be in a band touring the world, recording music, I guess we have made it, we’re playing music full time, we don’t have other jobs, we’re traveling around the world. So yeah, for me, this is a dream come true.
S: Is this what you wanted to do when you were a kid?
W: Yeah, but it’s something you never thought you could, to me it’s always been this kind of magic thing that you want to be part of but you don’t really know how. I guess we just spent a lot of time jamming and discovered music and how to play music. I think it’s something we’ve always wanted to do. It’s like a childhood dream really. I remember I used to sit in school and draw guitars and bands and hair bands, metal bands.
S: I read that you designed the cover of the debut album…
W: No, no I didn’t, the first EP in Australia I designed the cover, it was like a white cover with a triangle, kind of psychedelic volcanoes looking thing, it was actually Frank Frenzetta who designed that, so I can’t take credit for that because its incredible.
S: So your not still doing design anymore?
W: I think music has kind of taken over, when we had a lot of time, when we were starting out, I kind of had a lot of things going on. The music has kind of taken over. Maybe in the future. (Laughs)
S: What do you have planned for 2007?
W: I’m not sure yet, I’m not sure. Management wants to tour our asses off again. Our manager was saying that bands put in all the groundwork and they tour their asses off, especially bands from Australia because its so far, you have to work a lot harder. You put in all this ground work and play so many shows and by the time it gets kind of playing the shows where you get the big money, hopefully we can pace ourselves, not go insane.
S: Do you think you guys will work on any new material?
W: Yeah, we just kind of started to, it’s cool, especially when you’ve been playing the same songs every night. But yeah, we’ve been jamming, it’s exciting, it’s fun.
Friday, November 3, 2006
The Rapture Interview Uncut
Getting Ready for The Rapture
Coming of their 2003 album Echoes, which was named Album of the Year by Pitchfork Media, New York quartet The Rapture released Pieces of the People We Love, which continues the catchy indie dance music from their previous release. They their high energy live show to The Metro on Sunday, November 5th. I called saxophone/keyboard/percussionist Gabe Andruzzi when he on the tour bus in Boston.
Gabe Andruzzi: Are you calling from Lincoln Park right now?
DePaulia: Oh, you know Chicago?
GA: Yeah, I used to live in Chicago a long time ago. I had maybe one or two friends that went to DePaul.
D: Where did you live?
GA: I lived a bunch of different places. More or less like around Wicker Park and Humboldt Park, like Ashland and Chicago, and then way down Damen by the United Center and then I lived in Humboldt Park right near the Empty Bottle.
D: You guys were supposed to play Lollapalooza this year, what happened?
GA: Our schedule was really crazy at the time, and Luke had just had a child, I don’t really remember exactly what it was we just kind of became overbooked, and part of it had to do with us in personal.
D: Any chance we will see you there over the next five years?
GA: Probably, I’d say there’s probably a good chance, were you there?
D: Yeah, I was there, it was pretty cool.
GA: Was it fun?
D: Yeah it was great, lots of people there, more than I thought there would be.
GA: That’s cool. I can’t even imagine it, Chicago being overrun by a festival like that. Seems crazy.
D: It’s in Grant Park, and you look around and the city is all there, and there’s a huge swarm of people, and all the bands are playing, it’s surreal.
GA: It is weird, I’ve actually played in the bandshell once in Grant Park.
D: When was that?
GA: It was part of a protest that a convention was there in ’96 and it was like a bunch of weird Chicago bands. I don’t know if you know any of them, but like Flying Luttenbachers and Bobby Khan.
D: What were you like in college?
GA: I only went to college for a year and a half, and I went five years ago, so I was in my mid-twenties.
D: What were you majoring in?
GA: Ethnomusicology and religious studies.
D: What were you studying in religious studies?
GA: I was just beginning, I was studying the basics of how religious studies works, it’s a very broad field, but I was going to do something dealing with ritual music, like ritual religious music.
D: How did you get started with the saxophone?
GA: I think I’ve been listening to a lot of music with saxophones and my roommate at the time had a horn he played all through high school and college and I was like nineteen. I always jumped from instrument to instrument. I played like guitar and bass and drums all while I was a teenager and I picked up this horn and played it a bunch, got into it and decided I wanted to be a horn player.
D: How often do you hear “more cowbell?”
GA: A lot, actually, but not much in the past week. I used to hear it all the time.
D: I imagine it’s real annoying.
GA: Yeah, I guess it’s kind of annoying, it can be, it depends on who’s saying it.
D: So Will Ferrell has had an influence on the cowbell industry?
GA: He has definitely had an influence on the culture of the cowbell and how people think about the cowbell and relate to it. It’s a funny fuckin’ skit. He’s a funny man so you can’t really be mad at him.
D: Does The Rapture have beef with Jessica Simpson over the “Get Myself Into It” video?
GA: I don’t know. Not in particular, we had already set up it up a week before we shot it and we found out Jessica Simpson was doing a roller skating video, and we’re like ‘aw fuck, Jessica Simpson is doing a roller skating video and we’re doing a roller skating video?’ So it kind of made us feel a little dumb. But we found out what she was wearing and the director and Mattie (Safer) wanted to have her in the video and just kind of do something fun with it. And it’s fuckin’ Jessica Simpson. You can’t take her seriously as a musician, she’s just like a big cultural icon. I don’t think we were really trying to take a cheap shot at her or anything, we were just trying to do something goofy. I mean her videos, she’s trying to be funny. Have you seen her video?
D: Yeah.
GA: She’s trying to be clever and self depreciating at the beginning and then the whole video is like a big piece of pop candy. I kind of feel like she’s the polar opposite of what we do and what our roller skating video is like. Whatever, I’m fine having beef with her and I’m fine not having beef with her, it’s not really worth much of my time.
D: So we’re not going to see tabloids about a feud with the Rapture and Jessica Simpson?
GA: Oh no, we could go on tour together, that might be fun. Or do a movie together. I would love to do a movie with Jessica Simpson.
D: What’s the best part and the worst part of touring?
GA: The best part is really playing the shows and being able to play to a different audience every night as well as also kind of seeing places, or seeing cities. The worst part is not actually getting to really see cities, going somewhere and only being there for half a day, and a lot of that day your working. Waking up on the bus is always slightly alienating. The best part is definitely playing the shows, definitely performing, playing music.
D: Do you have a favorite song to play live?
GA: I think right now I really like playing “Get Myself Into It” and “The Sound.” I just really like playing the horn on “Get Myself Into It.” It’s a lot of fun to play it for some reason.
D: Is it hard to go out night after night and give a high energy performance, or does it come naturally with the music?
GA: It can be hard. Because the days when you are usually on tour are pretty low energy and then you get really amped up. So, when you come right out at first, it takes a little time. In the big picture of things being hard, its not that hard. It’s a weird thing to do. It’s a weird thing to do, it’s a very strange thing to do, to get up and perform and have lots of energy and have this rapport with audience for an hour, hour and a half every night. It’s hard to explain. It’s definitely like a weird kind of high. It’s kind of like sports in a way, when your adrenaline really starts pumping, and if it’s going good you get slightly euphoric.
D: In the last three years since the record, how long did you actually have off from The Rapture?
GA: I don’t know, maybe all in all, not seeing anybody, maybe two and a half month.
D: What did you do in those two and a half months?
GA: Probably one or two of them were Christmas vacations. You know, get out of town for a couple days here and there, go to the beach. I sat in front of my computer a lot, making music. There was never a stretch more than a month long. Like when we finished touring off of Echoes we took a month off.
D: Everyone seems to be making a big deal about switching producers, and the three new ones on the album, how much of an effect did it really have on the new album?
GA: I think it had a big effect. Part of a general approach to the new album was that in Echoes half the song were songs that the band had performed a lot and then the other half were songs the band kind of played and started writing and took shape in the studio. Whereas on the new album, we wrote tons and tons of songs before we got into the studio. We didn’t really write anything in the studio, everything had been demoed and played and that was central to the approach of making this record was to really have it be band focused. So starting there was in some ways the bigger thing. The relationships we had with the producers were all people we knew and were all friends, so we just pretty much just went into the studio and started working. With the DFA it was a long process before we started even recording Echoes and it was recorded over a longer period of time because everybody had day jobs. We weren’t in too much of a hurry. It’s hard to really say in that respect to really say what the difference is as far as what did each of the producers bring to the record that made it so different as opposed to when we worked with the DFA, because there’s so many other variables.
D: You seem to be always compared to bands like Gang of Four, is that annoying or do you feel flattered?
GA: For me it’s never really here or there, I’m not all that flattered, I mean they’re good band, but they never really hit me personally.
D: What do you listen to?
GA: I listen to a lot of different stuff. I listen to a lot of like, prog and prog disco, a lot of spacey disco. A lot of electronic music, and like house and electro. I listen to a lot of hip hip. I listen to a lot of early renaissance music. I started getting back into jazzy recently which I haven’t to really listened to in years. I started pulling out my old jazz record. I listen to a lot of west Africa music. Phillip Glass, that’s my dude. We all listen to a lot of different stuff. Luke (Jenner) listens to a lot of metal. He’s been getting into like shredding on the guitar.
D: Do you think it helps to have different musical backgrounds?
GA: Yeah, it does, it helps. It can get in the way as well, I mean we all listen to a lot of different music, we all have different approaches to even to listening to music and thinking of music. I think what we have in common is we’re familiar with a lot of different stuff. We all really love music, I don’t know if we’re record nerds, but we’re music nerds in different ways. It makes it easier, it can mean that we’re all open so we’re all open to each other and each others ideas. But what’s central to the band is our love of rhythm and our love of rhythms that makes people move.
D: What’s Robert Smith like?
GA: I only met him a couple times, he seems like a very nice shy person, who is possibly slightly paranoid.
D: Did you guys do anything special for Halloween?
GA: We played a show at the Bowery Ballroom. We wore skeleton costumes and wore these skull masks that would light up. They had a little battery in it. We did a dance to the “Monster Mash” before we played. I don’t know if it worked or what it looked like, not one person actually commented on it to me. We didn’t really decide on the dance moves until right before the show. We’ve been on tour so we did have time to work things out and kind of one of our qualities is that extra things like that we always kind of do half-assed with a lot of sense of humor. I don’t know how it went over I’m really curious. (Laughs)
D: I’ll be looking for it on YouTube.
GA: Somebody must have shot it on there with their camera or their phone or something.
An exerpt of this appeared in the November 3, 2006 issue of The DePaulia.
Coming of their 2003 album Echoes, which was named Album of the Year by Pitchfork Media, New York quartet The Rapture released Pieces of the People We Love, which continues the catchy indie dance music from their previous release. They their high energy live show to The Metro on Sunday, November 5th. I called saxophone/keyboard/percussionist Gabe Andruzzi when he on the tour bus in Boston.
Gabe Andruzzi: Are you calling from Lincoln Park right now?
DePaulia: Oh, you know Chicago?
GA: Yeah, I used to live in Chicago a long time ago. I had maybe one or two friends that went to DePaul.
D: Where did you live?
GA: I lived a bunch of different places. More or less like around Wicker Park and Humboldt Park, like Ashland and Chicago, and then way down Damen by the United Center and then I lived in Humboldt Park right near the Empty Bottle.
D: You guys were supposed to play Lollapalooza this year, what happened?
GA: Our schedule was really crazy at the time, and Luke had just had a child, I don’t really remember exactly what it was we just kind of became overbooked, and part of it had to do with us in personal.
D: Any chance we will see you there over the next five years?
GA: Probably, I’d say there’s probably a good chance, were you there?
D: Yeah, I was there, it was pretty cool.
GA: Was it fun?
D: Yeah it was great, lots of people there, more than I thought there would be.
GA: That’s cool. I can’t even imagine it, Chicago being overrun by a festival like that. Seems crazy.
D: It’s in Grant Park, and you look around and the city is all there, and there’s a huge swarm of people, and all the bands are playing, it’s surreal.
GA: It is weird, I’ve actually played in the bandshell once in Grant Park.
D: When was that?
GA: It was part of a protest that a convention was there in ’96 and it was like a bunch of weird Chicago bands. I don’t know if you know any of them, but like Flying Luttenbachers and Bobby Khan.
D: What were you like in college?
GA: I only went to college for a year and a half, and I went five years ago, so I was in my mid-twenties.
D: What were you majoring in?
GA: Ethnomusicology and religious studies.
D: What were you studying in religious studies?
GA: I was just beginning, I was studying the basics of how religious studies works, it’s a very broad field, but I was going to do something dealing with ritual music, like ritual religious music.
D: How did you get started with the saxophone?
GA: I think I’ve been listening to a lot of music with saxophones and my roommate at the time had a horn he played all through high school and college and I was like nineteen. I always jumped from instrument to instrument. I played like guitar and bass and drums all while I was a teenager and I picked up this horn and played it a bunch, got into it and decided I wanted to be a horn player.
D: How often do you hear “more cowbell?”
GA: A lot, actually, but not much in the past week. I used to hear it all the time.
D: I imagine it’s real annoying.
GA: Yeah, I guess it’s kind of annoying, it can be, it depends on who’s saying it.
D: So Will Ferrell has had an influence on the cowbell industry?
GA: He has definitely had an influence on the culture of the cowbell and how people think about the cowbell and relate to it. It’s a funny fuckin’ skit. He’s a funny man so you can’t really be mad at him.
D: Does The Rapture have beef with Jessica Simpson over the “Get Myself Into It” video?
GA: I don’t know. Not in particular, we had already set up it up a week before we shot it and we found out Jessica Simpson was doing a roller skating video, and we’re like ‘aw fuck, Jessica Simpson is doing a roller skating video and we’re doing a roller skating video?’ So it kind of made us feel a little dumb. But we found out what she was wearing and the director and Mattie (Safer) wanted to have her in the video and just kind of do something fun with it. And it’s fuckin’ Jessica Simpson. You can’t take her seriously as a musician, she’s just like a big cultural icon. I don’t think we were really trying to take a cheap shot at her or anything, we were just trying to do something goofy. I mean her videos, she’s trying to be funny. Have you seen her video?
D: Yeah.
GA: She’s trying to be clever and self depreciating at the beginning and then the whole video is like a big piece of pop candy. I kind of feel like she’s the polar opposite of what we do and what our roller skating video is like. Whatever, I’m fine having beef with her and I’m fine not having beef with her, it’s not really worth much of my time.
D: So we’re not going to see tabloids about a feud with the Rapture and Jessica Simpson?
GA: Oh no, we could go on tour together, that might be fun. Or do a movie together. I would love to do a movie with Jessica Simpson.
D: What’s the best part and the worst part of touring?
GA: The best part is really playing the shows and being able to play to a different audience every night as well as also kind of seeing places, or seeing cities. The worst part is not actually getting to really see cities, going somewhere and only being there for half a day, and a lot of that day your working. Waking up on the bus is always slightly alienating. The best part is definitely playing the shows, definitely performing, playing music.
D: Do you have a favorite song to play live?
GA: I think right now I really like playing “Get Myself Into It” and “The Sound.” I just really like playing the horn on “Get Myself Into It.” It’s a lot of fun to play it for some reason.
D: Is it hard to go out night after night and give a high energy performance, or does it come naturally with the music?
GA: It can be hard. Because the days when you are usually on tour are pretty low energy and then you get really amped up. So, when you come right out at first, it takes a little time. In the big picture of things being hard, its not that hard. It’s a weird thing to do. It’s a weird thing to do, it’s a very strange thing to do, to get up and perform and have lots of energy and have this rapport with audience for an hour, hour and a half every night. It’s hard to explain. It’s definitely like a weird kind of high. It’s kind of like sports in a way, when your adrenaline really starts pumping, and if it’s going good you get slightly euphoric.
D: In the last three years since the record, how long did you actually have off from The Rapture?
GA: I don’t know, maybe all in all, not seeing anybody, maybe two and a half month.
D: What did you do in those two and a half months?
GA: Probably one or two of them were Christmas vacations. You know, get out of town for a couple days here and there, go to the beach. I sat in front of my computer a lot, making music. There was never a stretch more than a month long. Like when we finished touring off of Echoes we took a month off.
D: Everyone seems to be making a big deal about switching producers, and the three new ones on the album, how much of an effect did it really have on the new album?
GA: I think it had a big effect. Part of a general approach to the new album was that in Echoes half the song were songs that the band had performed a lot and then the other half were songs the band kind of played and started writing and took shape in the studio. Whereas on the new album, we wrote tons and tons of songs before we got into the studio. We didn’t really write anything in the studio, everything had been demoed and played and that was central to the approach of making this record was to really have it be band focused. So starting there was in some ways the bigger thing. The relationships we had with the producers were all people we knew and were all friends, so we just pretty much just went into the studio and started working. With the DFA it was a long process before we started even recording Echoes and it was recorded over a longer period of time because everybody had day jobs. We weren’t in too much of a hurry. It’s hard to really say in that respect to really say what the difference is as far as what did each of the producers bring to the record that made it so different as opposed to when we worked with the DFA, because there’s so many other variables.
D: You seem to be always compared to bands like Gang of Four, is that annoying or do you feel flattered?
GA: For me it’s never really here or there, I’m not all that flattered, I mean they’re good band, but they never really hit me personally.
D: What do you listen to?
GA: I listen to a lot of different stuff. I listen to a lot of like, prog and prog disco, a lot of spacey disco. A lot of electronic music, and like house and electro. I listen to a lot of hip hip. I listen to a lot of early renaissance music. I started getting back into jazzy recently which I haven’t to really listened to in years. I started pulling out my old jazz record. I listen to a lot of west Africa music. Phillip Glass, that’s my dude. We all listen to a lot of different stuff. Luke (Jenner) listens to a lot of metal. He’s been getting into like shredding on the guitar.
D: Do you think it helps to have different musical backgrounds?
GA: Yeah, it does, it helps. It can get in the way as well, I mean we all listen to a lot of different music, we all have different approaches to even to listening to music and thinking of music. I think what we have in common is we’re familiar with a lot of different stuff. We all really love music, I don’t know if we’re record nerds, but we’re music nerds in different ways. It makes it easier, it can mean that we’re all open so we’re all open to each other and each others ideas. But what’s central to the band is our love of rhythm and our love of rhythms that makes people move.
D: What’s Robert Smith like?
GA: I only met him a couple times, he seems like a very nice shy person, who is possibly slightly paranoid.
D: Did you guys do anything special for Halloween?
GA: We played a show at the Bowery Ballroom. We wore skeleton costumes and wore these skull masks that would light up. They had a little battery in it. We did a dance to the “Monster Mash” before we played. I don’t know if it worked or what it looked like, not one person actually commented on it to me. We didn’t really decide on the dance moves until right before the show. We’ve been on tour so we did have time to work things out and kind of one of our qualities is that extra things like that we always kind of do half-assed with a lot of sense of humor. I don’t know how it went over I’m really curious. (Laughs)
D: I’ll be looking for it on YouTube.
GA: Somebody must have shot it on there with their camera or their phone or something.
An exerpt of this appeared in the November 3, 2006 issue of The DePaulia.
Demetri Martin Interview Uncut
These Are Questions…And Answers
Demetri Martin performed at The Vic on Thursday, November 2nd behind his new CD/DVD, These Are Jokes. Martin recorded the CD over a couple of nights at the Lakeshore Theater in Chicago last February. Since then, he has been working at “The Daily Show” as a Trendspotter and also signed on to be the spokesman for the new Microsoft Windows operating system, Windows Vista. He called me from the tour bus on his way from Boston to Albany.
Scott: Why did you choose Chicago to record your CD?
Demetri: I choose Chicago because the summer before I tried to record my CD on my own, I didn’t have a deal with Comedy Central or anything, and the emails I’ve got the last two years were generally Texas, like Austin, Seattle, San Francisco, and Chicago, so that summer, when I first tried it I went to San Francisco, I booked my own little gig…I just checked where I got emails from and the city the people generally wanted me to come to and I never got to perform in Chicago, and I didn’t like the way the recording came out (in San Francisco) because I didn’t hear it right, there were not enough microphones in the room, I mean the crowds were awesome, but the quality wasn’t good, like I don’t want to put this out. So then I ended up getting a deal with Comedy Central so I got better help so they could give me a good sound engineer. And I said I’ll do Chicago, ‘cause I haven’t been there and I bet you that’s the biggest crowd. So my first gig ever in Chicago are the ones that are recorded for my CD.
S: It seems like a lot of comedians are doing Chicago now for whatever reason.
D: The crowds are awesome, they’re great. They’re just, really like, warm, and into it.
S: What were you like in college?
D: I’m a dork, I procrastinated a lot, I liked hanging out with my friends, I got good grades. I did a lot of activities.
S: What were you involved in?
D: Student government, soup kitchen, I ran the soup kitchen, I started a youth group for Greek kids, what else did I do? I did some intramural stuff. Um, I can’t remember, it’s a long time ago now.
Scott: What’s the biggest difference between working for Conan and The Daily Show?
D: The biggest difference is I don’t have to spend that many hours at the Daily Show. I was a full time staff writer for Conan. It was about sixty hours a week. The Daily Show is once a month. Just go in the office, know what I mean?
S: Do you get to choose the Trendspotting topics or do they kind of suggest them to you?
D: It’s 50/50. I started by pitching them, and I get to pitch them and then sometimes they give it to me. It goes back and forth, like something is coming out and they’ll be like ‘Why don’t you do this?’ And it could be cool, and other times they’re like ‘What about this?’ and then they’re like good, light it up, let’s see what you got.
S: Have you noticed a lot more increase in your popularity since you started doing the Daily Show?
D: There’s a slight increase. It’s all on a small scale. When you’re in comedy, you tend to think things are bigger than they actually are. But every now and then you get a glimpse from the outside, in the regular world, and I’m really flying under the radar. So then in comedy, you can feel yourself kind of getting more exposure, but outside it’s just like a little drop, a blip.
S: Have you met anyone from working with TV that you were in awe of meeting?
D: No, but I got to meet Woody Allen and that was pretty cool. I don’t tend to get too star struck but he was pretty interesting. And I met (Steven) Spielberg. Those are a few biggies that I was just lucky to be in the presence of people with that are that accomplished. Even if it’s just like a half an hour, it’s just like ‘Wow, that’s great’. They were both gracious and they seemed like normal cool people, like nice people. You read so many things about people and you just know them as a weird public figure, not that I know them personally, but to be able to talk directly to that person, it’s a little bit surreal. They were really nice, Woody Allen was very friendly and outgoing and talkative, and I had read things like he doesn’t look at you, you know, he’s weird, blah, blah, blah. He was really nice, taller than I thought he would be, and he seemed like a really well spoken older guy. Steven Spielberg was very relaxed, kind of soothing, calming, you know? They’re self possessed; they’ve made so many things in their lives they just really know who they are.
S: How did you get hooked up with Windows Vista?
D: I got an email out of the blue and it said “Would you be interested in doing an ad campaign?” I said, ‘maybe I don’t know,’ and it went further and further and I ended up pitching them an idea and they liked it, so it kind of went forward.
S: The clearification.com website is pretty cool, you can’t even tell it’s an ad almost. The webisodes are really cool too, it seems like you have a lot of creative control.
D: Yeah, it was awesome. I didn’t get to direct, but I got to get my input on almost every part of it. And I got to write and act in it. So they were amazing, like I thought it was so cool they said ‘don’t worry, we’re going to be really hands off they just want something out there that’s very soft, the product placement is not obnoxious, and sure enough they stuck to their word, it’s really cool.
S: Are you going to be doing more with them in the future, like television ads or are you just going to stick to the webisodes?
D: For Microsoft, it’s just the web. They’re sponsoring an hour-long special I’m doing for Comedy Central. So again, that will be kind of soft advertising. To me it’s all very tasteful. I think it was a good decision in the end.
S: How did you get started with the glockenspiel and all the other instruments?
D: I did a one man show in 2002, and I wanted to score it, I wanted to make a real one man show, and it involved creating as many aspects of it as I could. So in addition to writing and performing the show, I thought I could put music in the show that I write myself and play. I made the clothes I wore in the show, I painted the postcard that would be posters for the show, I did some drawings for the show, but I didn’t know how to play music or anything, I didn’t have any instruments, I Started from scratch at that point. And I just fell in love with trying to learn and play music. So I just decided to try to put more and more of it in my act because I liked how it set the mood and it’s fun for me onstage to try to do a couple things at once.
S: Who do you listen to, as far as music goes?
D: I love the Beatles. And a lot of indie rock stuff. I kind of go through favorites, like Granddaddy, Elliott Smith. I’ve been listening to Leonard Cohen lately, ‘cause I never really listened to him. Jeremy Enigk, he has a new album coming out, he’s like a lo-fi singer songwriter kind of guy. I like Death Cab, I just watched the Bob Dylan documentary, awesome.
S: I saw Bob Dylan last night, he was here in Chicago, it was pretty cool.
D: You saw him? Really. How was it, did he do a lot of weird mumbling?
S: Yeah, he like barks the words almost, it’s kind of awkward. But at the same time you feel like, ‘wow that’s Bob Dylan’ and you’re so entranced by the whole experience. But as far as musically, it was kind of a disappointment.
D: Yeah, I heard that from somebody else. Did he do “Like a Rolling Stone?”
S: Yeah he did, he played some of his new stuff too and that was pretty cool too.
D: How big was the venue?
S: About four-thousand seats or so it was pretty intimate.
D: That’s pretty cool. Sweet. It’s too bad I missed it. It would be like ‘holy s***.’ It’s so cool to see Bob Dylan, there’s certain people that are just a part of history, on that level like that. I’d like to see (Paul) McCartney, I think that would be cool.
S: I saw McCartney last year, it was a lot better than Dylan, but he played a much bigger venue so you didn’t feel as connected. Anyways, what’s the best and worst part about being a comedian?
D: The best part about it is that it often doesn’t feel like work. It just feels like thinking and talking. The worst part about it is when it feels like work, because you can’t stop thinking or talking, it stays with you all the time. You don’t really leave the office, you kind of go everywhere with it. You can lose the other part of just having a life. I think that’s the danger of it.
S: How long of a process is it to be able to write a joke and then actually perform it?
D: Sometimes I think of one just before I go on. And then other times it will be in my notebook for a couple years, just trying to figure it out and fix it. You kind of find it’s very non-linear, it’s just trusting your own little head to go where it takes you, and then recording what you find when you go there. Then you say it to other people and see if they think it’s funny too, if they don’t then you learn quickly, ‘ok then that shouldn’t go in the act.’ Yeah, it’s very simple.
S: What are you working on now?
D: I’m halfway through a screenplay, after the tour I’ll finish that one. Then I’ll have the holidays, then I’ll rewrite another movie, that I actually wrote a script for with my friend. Then after that I’ll probably rewrite the first draft of the screenplay, then after that I’ll write the first draft of the third one, and then it’ll be the summertime, and I’ll take a break.
S: Is writing screenplays harder than writing a standup act for you?
D: Yes. It’s definitely harder for me. It’s incremental, you know? I guess a screenplay can be, but it’s one big piece, whereas a joke is short and if it’s no good then you can just move on.
S: How hard was it to try to get your mom and your grandma to participate on the CD?
D: They were willing. They were like ‘yeah we’ll do whatever you want, let us know.’
S: Are you surprised you got a parental advisory sticker on the CD?
D: Yeah, I knew that, I was there for the edit, and I kept a couple jokes that curse in there, part of me wanted to have no curses on the CD, but I wanted it to be kind of honest, I just wanted it to be like one of my shows. Yeah, I curse a little bit, I don’t do too much dirty stuff, but there’s some curses and stuff.
S: I was kind of shocked that they gave you an advisory sticker, but I could see how they did.
D: Yeah, I’m not a big dirty comic, for better or worse I do curse sometimes, but if I do another one maybe I’ll do it with no curses, who knows.
S: One last question and I’ll let you go, are you doing anything for Halloween?
D: I thought I was going to, I didn’t know what I was going to be but I would just go to my friend’s, my friend has a Halloween party every year, it’s really fun and you see a lot of people there in New York, but I’ll be in Columbus, doing a Daily Show spot.
S: What are you doing for the Daily Show?
D: I’m doing a Trend Spotting piece, So I don’t know if I’ll be in the edit room that night, so I might be dressed as a guy trying to edit his piece.
An exerpt of this appeared in the November 3, 2006 issue of The DePaulia
Demetri Martin performed at The Vic on Thursday, November 2nd behind his new CD/DVD, These Are Jokes. Martin recorded the CD over a couple of nights at the Lakeshore Theater in Chicago last February. Since then, he has been working at “The Daily Show” as a Trendspotter and also signed on to be the spokesman for the new Microsoft Windows operating system, Windows Vista. He called me from the tour bus on his way from Boston to Albany.
Scott: Why did you choose Chicago to record your CD?
Demetri: I choose Chicago because the summer before I tried to record my CD on my own, I didn’t have a deal with Comedy Central or anything, and the emails I’ve got the last two years were generally Texas, like Austin, Seattle, San Francisco, and Chicago, so that summer, when I first tried it I went to San Francisco, I booked my own little gig…I just checked where I got emails from and the city the people generally wanted me to come to and I never got to perform in Chicago, and I didn’t like the way the recording came out (in San Francisco) because I didn’t hear it right, there were not enough microphones in the room, I mean the crowds were awesome, but the quality wasn’t good, like I don’t want to put this out. So then I ended up getting a deal with Comedy Central so I got better help so they could give me a good sound engineer. And I said I’ll do Chicago, ‘cause I haven’t been there and I bet you that’s the biggest crowd. So my first gig ever in Chicago are the ones that are recorded for my CD.
S: It seems like a lot of comedians are doing Chicago now for whatever reason.
D: The crowds are awesome, they’re great. They’re just, really like, warm, and into it.
S: What were you like in college?
D: I’m a dork, I procrastinated a lot, I liked hanging out with my friends, I got good grades. I did a lot of activities.
S: What were you involved in?
D: Student government, soup kitchen, I ran the soup kitchen, I started a youth group for Greek kids, what else did I do? I did some intramural stuff. Um, I can’t remember, it’s a long time ago now.
Scott: What’s the biggest difference between working for Conan and The Daily Show?
D: The biggest difference is I don’t have to spend that many hours at the Daily Show. I was a full time staff writer for Conan. It was about sixty hours a week. The Daily Show is once a month. Just go in the office, know what I mean?
S: Do you get to choose the Trendspotting topics or do they kind of suggest them to you?
D: It’s 50/50. I started by pitching them, and I get to pitch them and then sometimes they give it to me. It goes back and forth, like something is coming out and they’ll be like ‘Why don’t you do this?’ And it could be cool, and other times they’re like ‘What about this?’ and then they’re like good, light it up, let’s see what you got.
S: Have you noticed a lot more increase in your popularity since you started doing the Daily Show?
D: There’s a slight increase. It’s all on a small scale. When you’re in comedy, you tend to think things are bigger than they actually are. But every now and then you get a glimpse from the outside, in the regular world, and I’m really flying under the radar. So then in comedy, you can feel yourself kind of getting more exposure, but outside it’s just like a little drop, a blip.
S: Have you met anyone from working with TV that you were in awe of meeting?
D: No, but I got to meet Woody Allen and that was pretty cool. I don’t tend to get too star struck but he was pretty interesting. And I met (Steven) Spielberg. Those are a few biggies that I was just lucky to be in the presence of people with that are that accomplished. Even if it’s just like a half an hour, it’s just like ‘Wow, that’s great’. They were both gracious and they seemed like normal cool people, like nice people. You read so many things about people and you just know them as a weird public figure, not that I know them personally, but to be able to talk directly to that person, it’s a little bit surreal. They were really nice, Woody Allen was very friendly and outgoing and talkative, and I had read things like he doesn’t look at you, you know, he’s weird, blah, blah, blah. He was really nice, taller than I thought he would be, and he seemed like a really well spoken older guy. Steven Spielberg was very relaxed, kind of soothing, calming, you know? They’re self possessed; they’ve made so many things in their lives they just really know who they are.
S: How did you get hooked up with Windows Vista?
D: I got an email out of the blue and it said “Would you be interested in doing an ad campaign?” I said, ‘maybe I don’t know,’ and it went further and further and I ended up pitching them an idea and they liked it, so it kind of went forward.
S: The clearification.com website is pretty cool, you can’t even tell it’s an ad almost. The webisodes are really cool too, it seems like you have a lot of creative control.
D: Yeah, it was awesome. I didn’t get to direct, but I got to get my input on almost every part of it. And I got to write and act in it. So they were amazing, like I thought it was so cool they said ‘don’t worry, we’re going to be really hands off they just want something out there that’s very soft, the product placement is not obnoxious, and sure enough they stuck to their word, it’s really cool.
S: Are you going to be doing more with them in the future, like television ads or are you just going to stick to the webisodes?
D: For Microsoft, it’s just the web. They’re sponsoring an hour-long special I’m doing for Comedy Central. So again, that will be kind of soft advertising. To me it’s all very tasteful. I think it was a good decision in the end.
S: How did you get started with the glockenspiel and all the other instruments?
D: I did a one man show in 2002, and I wanted to score it, I wanted to make a real one man show, and it involved creating as many aspects of it as I could. So in addition to writing and performing the show, I thought I could put music in the show that I write myself and play. I made the clothes I wore in the show, I painted the postcard that would be posters for the show, I did some drawings for the show, but I didn’t know how to play music or anything, I didn’t have any instruments, I Started from scratch at that point. And I just fell in love with trying to learn and play music. So I just decided to try to put more and more of it in my act because I liked how it set the mood and it’s fun for me onstage to try to do a couple things at once.
S: Who do you listen to, as far as music goes?
D: I love the Beatles. And a lot of indie rock stuff. I kind of go through favorites, like Granddaddy, Elliott Smith. I’ve been listening to Leonard Cohen lately, ‘cause I never really listened to him. Jeremy Enigk, he has a new album coming out, he’s like a lo-fi singer songwriter kind of guy. I like Death Cab, I just watched the Bob Dylan documentary, awesome.
S: I saw Bob Dylan last night, he was here in Chicago, it was pretty cool.
D: You saw him? Really. How was it, did he do a lot of weird mumbling?
S: Yeah, he like barks the words almost, it’s kind of awkward. But at the same time you feel like, ‘wow that’s Bob Dylan’ and you’re so entranced by the whole experience. But as far as musically, it was kind of a disappointment.
D: Yeah, I heard that from somebody else. Did he do “Like a Rolling Stone?”
S: Yeah he did, he played some of his new stuff too and that was pretty cool too.
D: How big was the venue?
S: About four-thousand seats or so it was pretty intimate.
D: That’s pretty cool. Sweet. It’s too bad I missed it. It would be like ‘holy s***.’ It’s so cool to see Bob Dylan, there’s certain people that are just a part of history, on that level like that. I’d like to see (Paul) McCartney, I think that would be cool.
S: I saw McCartney last year, it was a lot better than Dylan, but he played a much bigger venue so you didn’t feel as connected. Anyways, what’s the best and worst part about being a comedian?
D: The best part about it is that it often doesn’t feel like work. It just feels like thinking and talking. The worst part about it is when it feels like work, because you can’t stop thinking or talking, it stays with you all the time. You don’t really leave the office, you kind of go everywhere with it. You can lose the other part of just having a life. I think that’s the danger of it.
S: How long of a process is it to be able to write a joke and then actually perform it?
D: Sometimes I think of one just before I go on. And then other times it will be in my notebook for a couple years, just trying to figure it out and fix it. You kind of find it’s very non-linear, it’s just trusting your own little head to go where it takes you, and then recording what you find when you go there. Then you say it to other people and see if they think it’s funny too, if they don’t then you learn quickly, ‘ok then that shouldn’t go in the act.’ Yeah, it’s very simple.
S: What are you working on now?
D: I’m halfway through a screenplay, after the tour I’ll finish that one. Then I’ll have the holidays, then I’ll rewrite another movie, that I actually wrote a script for with my friend. Then after that I’ll probably rewrite the first draft of the screenplay, then after that I’ll write the first draft of the third one, and then it’ll be the summertime, and I’ll take a break.
S: Is writing screenplays harder than writing a standup act for you?
D: Yes. It’s definitely harder for me. It’s incremental, you know? I guess a screenplay can be, but it’s one big piece, whereas a joke is short and if it’s no good then you can just move on.
S: How hard was it to try to get your mom and your grandma to participate on the CD?
D: They were willing. They were like ‘yeah we’ll do whatever you want, let us know.’
S: Are you surprised you got a parental advisory sticker on the CD?
D: Yeah, I knew that, I was there for the edit, and I kept a couple jokes that curse in there, part of me wanted to have no curses on the CD, but I wanted it to be kind of honest, I just wanted it to be like one of my shows. Yeah, I curse a little bit, I don’t do too much dirty stuff, but there’s some curses and stuff.
S: I was kind of shocked that they gave you an advisory sticker, but I could see how they did.
D: Yeah, I’m not a big dirty comic, for better or worse I do curse sometimes, but if I do another one maybe I’ll do it with no curses, who knows.
S: One last question and I’ll let you go, are you doing anything for Halloween?
D: I thought I was going to, I didn’t know what I was going to be but I would just go to my friend’s, my friend has a Halloween party every year, it’s really fun and you see a lot of people there in New York, but I’ll be in Columbus, doing a Daily Show spot.
S: What are you doing for the Daily Show?
D: I’m doing a Trend Spotting piece, So I don’t know if I’ll be in the edit room that night, so I might be dressed as a guy trying to edit his piece.
An exerpt of this appeared in the November 3, 2006 issue of The DePaulia
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