Indie Ah Um (Indie Central XII)

quote:

Pitchfork: It also seems like there were measures made to not make a radio-friendly album. I remember a couple of weeks before the record came out, you guys talked to MTV and said you'd taken off all the catchiest songs. I don't know if that was an overstatement or not, but the version of "Major Label Debut" that shows up on the bonus disc is, by some distance, the much catchier or more radio-friendly version. Is the band making a conscious attempt to avoid commercial success?

Dave: When I played Kevin the mix of "Major Label Debut", he said, "Dude, I'm not going to fucking sing this song every night for the rest of my life. And then we put it away for two or three months, and played it again. People who aren't in the band heard it and said, "I love that fucking tune, I can't get it out of my head," so then we were thinking, "Yeah, it's a nice tune, but we don't want to be the Gin Blossoms." People like it, and we like it, but we started out as an art band, so for us to deliberately make a song like that would be insincere. We didn't want to fall into that trap. There's a mix of "Ibi" with loud vocals, and when I play it for other people they're like, "Now it makes sense," and the version you hear on the radio it sounds like some guy with fucking bombs coming down and the roof caving in, and he's singing a great tune, but in the middle of a fucking war zone. For them, that's cooler, that's better. I'd rather we lose some listeners and other people listen to it and take time to go, "No, man, I just got my fucking head kicked in, and this isn't trying to gloss me over."

Kevin: Indie rock doesn't really exist anymore. And you either sound like U2 or "Do You Think I'm Sexy" by Rod Stewart. And that seems to be the fucking way people love music these days. Thank god for the Animal Collective and the crazy ones like that who are still making records that are challenging and different. But all I hear are "Do You Think I'm Sexy" and "With or Without You" remixed 8,000 times. We want to have a career where we can look back and feel good about everything. You don't want to end up playing picnics and shopping malls and looking like a fucking bloated idiot.