In less than 24 hours, 4th of July celebrations will officially be in full swing. But if you're an RX Bandits fan, you're probably busy thinking about July 8th. Only five days until the band takes the stage in front of their rabid hometown crowd at The House of Blues in Anaheim along side Dredg on the first date of their co headlining U.S. tour. The article about them (penned by yours truly) in this week's paper is still quite fresh, and if you haven't glanced at it yet, I suggest you click off this post and do so HERE.
For the rest of you, there maybe a little curiosity about the parts of my fun-filled conversation with Matt Embree and Steve Choi that didn't make it into the interview. Touching on topics ranging from their work with producer Chris Fudurich on their new album Mandala (out July 21), pictured, to insight to Embree's travels to Central and South America, there is plenty of worth-while bits that couldn't be condensed into 750 words. Though slightly edited for length and short attention spans, I'm sure you will walk away from this a little wiser, at least in regard to the band.
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OC Weekly: What are
some of the things you've both done inside and outside of music since your last
album that may have helped you write the new one?
Matt Embree: Since
we recorded “…And the Battle Begun”, I went to Central America twice and went
to
and I think listening and being influenced by all the kind of stuff that people
down there really like. That kind of music that is just on the radio and stuff.
Like on they have a lot reggaeton stations and stuff, and I'm not particularly
stoked on reggaeton but I remember this one cab driver that was telling me all
the reggaeton I should listen to and he was totally pumped on it. He told me
Daddy Yankee was like the dopest guy and I listened to Daddy Yankee and I was
like this is terrible, but whatever.
And at least more Latin rhythms definitely seeped into my
writing out of left field. But having you ask that question made me realize it
wasn't as obscure as I might have thought. Just having spent that time, it
wasn't like I stayed at resorts or anything like that. The first time I was
just hanging out with a friend hitchhiking and traveling. And a lot of times
when we'd hear the music we'd be hitchhiking in peoples cars and they'd have
the radio on. And a lot of times when they turn it on it's classical, like
traditional music and it's a lot of Sambas and like Cumbia and Meregue and the percussion
and constant beats and the polyrhythms, for me that definitely is found on the
new album from the parts that I put into it.
Steve Choi: I've
just experience life. I guess I've had some changes in the philosophy in how I
view creativity. I've been looking into other music too. I didn't spend too
much time traveling in
think my interest and desire to utilize Latin music has grown. I feel like
“Decrescendo” was touching on that slightly. And in life I've kinda watched some
friends pick themselves up and watch other friends break themselves off and
fall into obscurity.
We've both experienced that a lot where we've watched people
either change their ways or solidify who they're gonna become for the rest of
their lives and that's kind of effected us and the way we wanted to work. I
feel like what we wanted to accomplish and do with the band had a lot to do
with that.
ME: I'd totally
have to agree with that. We're at this age in our late 20s where with a lot of
our friends it's like you either commit and go big and handle your business and
get what you gotta get or people just get stuck in the rut and just fall off.
And in a strange way that has been inspiring.
SC: It's really
put things into perspective for us and made us appreciate what we have going
for us and everything that we still have yet to attain for ourselves.
ME: This
particular recording was a rather surprising deluge of creativity. Besides the
actual album, we also have about seven more hours of music that we recorded,
all improvised where we'd go and just sit together in a quiet zone outside the
studio or something and make up an idea for a landscape, like a visual concept
and just try to create it musically. So the amount of stuff that came out that
was usable, that was good is surprising. Because a lot of times in that
situation it can get really chaotic and maybe full on extreme people would love
it, maybe the avant garde people. But for the average listener, maybe not so
much. But I'd say this time through, at least three hours of it, like we kinda
made four records. And given the fact that we only really spent a month and a
half writing all the stuff, I think what Choi was saying about all the stuff in
our lives really inspired us.
SC: Over the
course of this year while we were writing and trying to deal with our personnel
and ourselves, by the time we finally got into the studio and looking at each
other, we were like “we're here, we didn't think this day would come”. And it
actually sparked something in us for sure. We've been living and breathing and
thinking about this record every day since September, hell even before that
when Matt wrote Chorizo, which we won't divulge which title that is on the
record, some people know but he wrote that before we even went on the tour last
summer. And there are other grooves on the record that have been chilling for
days.
So conceptually the record has existed for us well over a
year. So to finally kind of like free ourselves of that was just huge. It
wasn't even all just happiness it was just a huge slurry of emotion. So I think
the creative philosophy that me and Matt share is that you gotta get things out
of your head. If you come up with an idea, you've got to get it out and go on
to the next thing. We're not the type to incubate and sculpt things. You gotta
move on to the next thing. You're only as good as what you're doing at that
time.
OCW: This is your first
record as a four piece. Did the dynamics of writing a song change much for this
record?
ME: Not really that much, not as much as some people who are
fans of our music might think. Because a lot of the time, the other couple
records since The Resignation, where
[Chris] Sheets and [Steven] Borth were both on, we'd write the songs and they weren't really
active participants in the song writing. They would come in and we'd have some
parts where maybe horns would work better and they'd come in and write them or
there are some songs that just don't even have horns in the resignation and
Battle Begun. Where we didn't think it sounded good, we never tried to force
it.
And now that's it's just a four piece, it didn't feel much
different but I just think our chemistry was better because there was a lot of
emotions and other unsaid things. And once we got our communication all
straightened out, everything came easily. But as far as the song writing
process changing, not much. We don't go by it in a really calculated way.
Usually Choi or I will bring in a part and then we just try to make the song
work off that part. Or sometimes it's almost a completed song and then we as a
band just work on transitions, intros and outros.
SC: Our desire to keep up that vibe like there was equality
there was more of just like a respect and a political thing. To their credit,
there were some things that they really took the helm on. But in general, of
our whole sound and aesthetic, they were really more like players.
OCW: How do you feel
that this record is a progressive step from the last one?
SC: One thing
that I was mentioning to the other guys at a recent photo shoot was that I was
stoked on this record because specifically it sounds more mature to me because
we locked ourselves in. We were much more in tune with what our strengths are
and we weren't necessarily trying to run ourselves across the board we were
just trying to focus on what our strengths are while comfortably pushing new
bounds for us. We're just more grown and more mature and all that means to me
at the moment is that we're more familiar with our own boundaries and who we
are as players and what we do creatively. We're just way more intuitive with
it.
OCW: As a producer,
what are some things about Chris Fudurich that enticed you to work with him again
on this album?
ME: Well, first of all, he's know us since he worked with us
on Progress. I was 20 years old, and
I'm 28 now. That's a lot of growing up. At that point, we were barely starting
to make money with the band, I was still living with my mom. Now we've been
making a living playing music for six years, maybe even more. And so ultimately
he knows the sound of the band and he's watched me grow as a musician, he
watched us all grow as musicians. For The
Resignation, we did the record live just like this one with two inch tape
and we used ProTools a little bit just to do some over dubs.
To me, his greatest strong point is his ear. He's really
good at getting basic sounds. And we wanted to have a third party. The last
record, we did ourselves and it was really difficult at time for example if I
was playing the role of producer and I was recording someone's part and maybe
they were getting a little frustrated because they keep playing sharp or not
playing the rhythm correctly and it was really difficult to tell them over and
over that we gotta do it again, we gotta do it again. Because then you take it
personally because it's coming from someone in the band.
Whereas if it's coming from a third party whose not inside
the band, does not share your creative views, is looking at the piece as a
whole and what would sound better for the entire song, for the whole
composition, rather than you in your head are just stoked on this [guitar] part
just because of how long it took you to come up with it, whether it was good or
not. Sometimes I'll write something and be like “It has to be good because I
spent so much time on it”. But it's terrible, just totally lame. So we brought
Chris in again and it's been really good. There were definitely times when we
had disagreements, but every good producer and every good band has disagreements.
SC: Having
disagreements is an honesty that you can only hope to achieve when you're
working with someone on a collaborative effort. Like Matt said, it was the
perfect objective thing, but with one very important detail and that is he has
an objective view for us but that only works because he actually gets what
we're doing not just musically but creatively. He knows enough of bands and he
knows a broad enough spectrum of music to understand what might have been our
influences, what kind of styles of music we're trying to take. Maybe not for
every song, but for the most part he gets it. He gets where the funk comes in,
he gets where the reggae and the R&B and the soul and the aggressive modern
rock stuff that we're trying to do comes in. He get's it and that is crucial.
ME: One thing I
have to sing his praises for one more time is that a lot of producers have a
formula and in order to get their sound, they have to stick to their formula.
So they have to have the drummer play to a click and it's gotta be beat detected
and everything has to be on the grid and the guitar player has to play out of a
specific amp and a specific guitar and everything and he's not like that. And
you have to look at the other stuff he does, he does a lot of pop stuff. He's
done Britany Spears and he's done Nada Surf and he's done Jimmy Eat World. That
Jimmy Eat World EP is one of the best things they have put out in a while and
each project he just comes to it and
says okay, I'm gonna do it like this. And for us, nothing was played to a click
and we would just do takes, all in the same room together, all looking at each
other. And he understood something which I think is something important.
I believe in the old recordings, there is something more
captured there than just the sound. In a lot of my old favorite recordings its
because all of the musicians were in the same room together and whatever kind
of emotion or vibe, the unexplainable and the intangible is also captured in
the recording. And that feeling is somehow transmitted through the speakers, so
its more than the sound. And he totally understood that, he didn't try to steer
it anyway. We were like “look Chris we want to do it live, we want to do it to
tape,” and he said let's figure out the best way to make it sound the best. It
was awesome, it was a great experience.
SC: While we were
tracking it was either good vibe or bad vibe, it was either play well or not
play well.
ME: It was either
good tone or not so good tone. It was like “Matt your guitar tone sucks on this
song, change it”.
OCW: Could you give
me a little insight into the title “Mandala”?
ME: For me
personally, that's not something that I wish to steer in any direction and it's
kinda of like the meaning of the lyrics to songs and things like that. I don't
really like to tell people how they should think about it. All I can say is
that it's a word in Sanskrit and it has a lot of different meanings to a lot of
different cultures. Different cultures adapted it, its not Buddhist, it's not
Hindu, it's a Sanskrit word that predates all those religions. It just kind of
popped out of me and that's about as far as I'm gonna go with that. It has
definitely different meanings to me and probably has different meanings to
everyone in the band and for one reason or another it became the album title
and it will have different reasons for different people. I can definitely say
that it's quite a journey reading about mandalas in the form of a word, mandalas in the form
of physical creation, in Hindi religion, people create Mandalas.
SC: It's a shape,
like a sign of sacred geometry. Like you make, actually draw an elaborate shape
and put it on a rug or on a rack. It's a shape to induce this state of mind or
state of being which is, like [Matt] said, only one aspect of it. It kinda
works out funny because he suggested the title when we were working out song
titles and everyone else was down for it, but I was kind of like the dissenting
opinion at first. I always liked the meaning but I wasn't necessarily down for
it to be the title of the album at first.
The more I thought about it, the more I couldn't deny the
concept of it. Because, whatever, it was a superficially dissent on my part
because I didn't like the sound of the word. I will always like the meaning,
but the more I thought about the concept and how it tied into us making the
record, and every aspect whether it's the sound of the record, whether it was
lyrically for Matt, whether it was instrumentation, it all tied into it for us.
In a way we had to make our own Mandalas to get to be one, to make our own sort
of non physical Mandala which was this album, this collaborative creation. So I
just couldn't fight the flow.
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