BR& NEW

It’s a great, almost hour-long interview. I encourage you to read the whole thing. Here are a few excerpts:

“Sometimes I want people to know there is something going on here. We want to present something that is good and honest and we have to do that in our own way but it is sometimes hard to convey that to people who are waiting.”

“Like, I probably couldn’t pick the guys from Archers of Loaf or Built to Spill out of a crowd but I know every word to their songs and every note backward and forward it just never occurred to me to dig into their background. I understand fandom, and when you like art you want to be immersed in the world of the person who created it but people can only be involved as much as that person let’s them. We pulled back those borders closer to ourselves and it did kind of create this enigmatic presence but we weren’t trying to create mystery.”

“I think The Devil and God saved Brand New. Daisy was just the venting of anxiety, of letting go and doing the right thing for us personally and as a band. It’s a very hard way to do something but it is the best way. There’s a lot of pent up emotion that goes into owning up to who you are, what you are doing and the choices you are making so Daisy was us rejoicing in that, a burning rejoice.”

“Most of my writing is realizations. A record is like a complex problem and the themes and ideas we want to explore are part of the equation to solving that problem. It’s about righting a great problem with a lens that is constantly zooming in on possible solutions.”

“I joked a while ago that Brand New was going to make happy music. I mean I said it on stage one night and everyone ran with it. I don’t think we’re going to write happy music though. We do sad bastard quite well (laughs).  But we want our music to answer questions and the thing is that sometimes those questions are sad ones. We want to make new music with new answers but sometimes the questions are still sad ones and sometimes that is just a reality. Life is about accepting the hard parts like loss, and succeeding in society.”