Your new album is a much darker affair in places than the kind of stuff we’re used to from Fountains of Wayne – was this an intentional change in direction? Do you think it is a change in direction?
Adam: I don’t really hear the dark thing – I’ve seen that written a couple of times – I suppose for me there’s a few songs that have a little bit of melancholy to them but I don’t really hear it as a dark record. I hear it as a different sounding record maybe from the others – we made a conscious effort to make it a little more organic sounding, with more acoustic instruments and less distortion.
Chris: There’s parts of the record that are darker than things we’ve done before, you know, like “Cemetery Guns” is a song about a funeral and it’s irony free which is new territory for us I think.
Cemetery Guns in particular is an amazing track. Where did the inspiration for that song come from?
Chris: A journalist actually – I can’t remember where we were but somebody said to us “don’t you ever feel the need to address all the horrible things going on in the world?” It might have been on the eve of some US military action or something, I don’t know, and I was thinking “well why the hell not?” You know, the inevitable thought process was “we’re not a band like that but why the hell aren’t we a band like that?” There’s nothing wrong with writing about things which are interesting to you, so that’s where it comes from.
It also feels like it’s got more of a country or folk-pop feel to it than previous records, certainly compared to an album like “Traffic and Weather” although country has always been a part of your records. Was that change of sound intentional to the record?
Adam: I think that was – I mean the funny thing is that Chris and I used to only play acoustic guitar when we first played music together when we went to college together, and when we started doing bands and stuff we started adding a little more rock to it, but it was still pretty wimpy stuff, and when we made the first FOW record, it was almost like a challenge to us because there were a lot of bands at the time that were heavy but melodic, so we got a Marshall amp and we’d never used any distortion on anything before, so for us it was like “woah, what does this do?!” but this record is a little bit more like where we came from, and also the way we write. Stuff is written on acoustic guitar for the most part.
You’ve always had at least one country song on each record you’ve done, more on the most recent – how important has country been to you in terms of influences?
Chris: I think we both like certain country music, probably not the mainstream country music .
Adam: I always thought of country music as, like, boot camp for songwriters, breaking everything down to its fundamentals and the song usually succeeds or fails based on how well it’s written – and in that sense, it’s really sort of instructive to listen to those early songwriters - you know, I’m a big George Jones fan, and I imagine your readers are into that sort of shit right?
Some are haha. How was playing the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in San Francisco festival for you? Did you enjoy it?
Chris: They just asked and we said yes. There were a lot of other bands on the bill who weren’t bluegrass. It started as the bluegrass festival and now it’s called the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival because..
Adam: They wanted to sell more tickets? [Laughs]
Chris: Actually the band on stage behind us were called Hot Tuna [Laughs]
Adam: You know one thing that we did that probably had an effect on this record was that we did a tour of the US and I think in Japan too, where it was kind of an acoustic tour – I mean it was still the four of us but there were no electric guitars and Brian was just playing a stripped down little drum-kit, and we did that on and off for probably 9 months, and that definitely affected some of the arrangements on this record, and you know, it definitely puts more focus on the lyrics and the melodies.
How do you feel about moving to Yep Roc in the States? It’s a label we’re really familiar with at Americana UK which has a lot of prestige attached to it. Do you think the direction your music has travelled in bought you towards a label like Yep Roc?
Adam: So far it’s worked out really well. They’ve been doing a better job than anybody else has done for a long time I would say. And the business has changed so much you know. It used to be all about who could get you access to the record stores, get your record into the actual store, and that doesn’t really matter anymore. It’s also like who could get you on the big radio stations and that doesn’t really matter for us anymore. So what you really need is people who give a shit somewhere, and they seem to get us.
Chris: It definitely was a factor that their roster is full of people we listen to and grew up listening to – Robyn Hitchcock, Nick Lowe. And Ron Sexsmith used to be on the label – he’s a guy I really admire.
Do you think your music has a political element in it at all, not in an overt way but because you’re often talking about working class characters and their lives, even if the situations you put them in can be quite funny?
Adam: If it does, it’s probably unintentional. I mean I don’t set out with any kind of agenda to make a larger point about society, but maybe once in a while it sneaks in there. I’d like to think that somebody read that into it! [Laughs]
Chris: I’m actually one of the most political people I know. I’m a junkie as far as reading opinion pieces and following US politics particularly, but that’s part of my life that has never really gone over to the records.
Adam: I mean one thing that I think happens if you put in some details into a story about a character is that it helps it seem more real and people can identify with it more rather than just make a big obvious general point.
What kind of state do you think the music industry is in at the moment for guitar based pop music?
Chris: I’ve no idea – I mean I don’t turn on the radio really so I don’t even know what’s on there.
Adam: I mean it’s hard for me to say what it’s like for bands like us in general. I think the best thing a band can do right now is to just try and have a loyal fanbase, which we do on a small scale you know, and do something which just tries to bring them back over and over again and just try to be self sufficient like that, but I’d say that the industry in general has changed so it’s not like that lottery ticket mentality any more. I think if you want to do it, you have to like playing music and want to do it for a while. You know the chance of writing one song that’s going to sell millions of records and make you millions of dollars – that used to be a fairly reasonable thing to think might happen, but even huge superstars now don’t sell lots of records.
How did you feel about Katy Perry covering “Hackensack”? What did you think of her version of the song and how did it come about?
Adam: You know, it was cool that she did it and we had no contact with her before that, and then I had a weird thing where she got in touch with me and said she wanted to write together, and I said “sure, I’m happy to write on some record that’s going to sell 10 million copies” but I met with her, had dinner with her and she was like “oh yeah, we’re definitely going to write together” and then I never heard from her again [laughs]. Maybe next time!
Do you get the same kind of fans turning up to your gigs in the UK as back at home? Have you noticed your fanbase broadening as the span of your music has broadened?
Adam: I guess we’ll tell you tomorrow – we haven’t played here in 4 years.
Chris: My recollection is that it’s the same kind of mix of people, it’s like older people who are fans of the Kinks, sometimes it’s their kids and people who have heard the singles and stuff on the radio. Definitely in America it’s like a really strange mix of people who are pop music aficionados , people who love Marshall Crenshaw and the Smithereens – this band called the Shoes keeps coming up for some reason who I don’t really know anything about – they were from the 70s. And there’s music nerds who have their LP collections and then some people in the audience just hold up signs that read “My daughter’s name is Stacy.” [Laughs]
Adam: It’s nice when it’s multi-generational. Definitely now we have families turn up for shows where their kids like us. Sowing the seeds for our survival [laughs].
What are your plans after you’ve finished your run of UK dates?
Adam: I think we’re going to be touring on and off for a while, we’ll be going off to Japan and then Australia, and then more US stuff and hopefully come back to Europe and do a more extensive European tour, and that’s about as far as we’ve really thought it through at this point. I mean this has been a pretty short trip, ten days or something, just to kind of get our feet wet again…
Chris: …but there’s a lot of places we’d really love to play that we haven’t been to on this trip – Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona.
Yeah we tried to book you for our Liverpool festival but we couldn’t afford you.
Adam: Ah we’d have loved to, we didn’t hear about it - it didn’t even reach our ears.
[Sobs]
