I think maybe the music expresses something visceral and the lyrics express something mental and emotional. Who knows? Maybe the upbeat music is directly representative of the musicians who are playing, and the lyrics are more a representation of me as a writer, or the various personae I inhabit when I write. The paradox you've pointed to is definitely characteristic of many of the songs on "Golden Age of Knowhere. JC: Well said. I know how you got your band name, but how much thought went into your debut album title?
CE: Well, it depends on how you look at it. We approached the record as if we were setting out to do something new, like building a new society from the ground up, but with kids making the decisions. We took the ideas from "Lord of the Flies.
We wrote half that record in our friend's garage, so that furthered our sense of otherness. We felt shipwrecked, but not in a negative way. It was more like, we're all out here doing this together, in a nowhere town, and as far as we were concerned, in sort of a nowhere time, so the album title is significant and has meaning, but we didn't wrack our brains to come up with it.
It just sort of made sense, and I liked that it had a literary feel to it. It's faux-literary, just like many songs are bastard poetry, unless they adhere to some kind of poetic form. We think form is restrictive, which is why we go through different writing phases to shape our songs, or find a shape we can all live with.
JC: Do you enjoy playing festivals -- they are so king in summer -- or do you fear you'll get lost in the crowd? CE: Our first real shows outside the backyard party scene were festivals. We had opened for The Faint and Crystal Castles, so we knew slightly what to expect.
That was kind of daunting, because I had never seen so many people jumping in unison to our music. I had to remind myself that it was really happening, and that I wasn't watching someone else's DVD or something. That was good training for many festivals to come, so, yeah, we love festivals. We can't wait to get back to Fuji Rock, Reading and Leeds this year. When we started the band we were pretty young, adolescent. I think everyone will gladly accept that. Were not trying to keep at the same punk idealistic.
What was your relationship with the label and what became of your contract? They really wanted us to be the next At the Drive-In. They saw us — the energy, the rawness. So the relationship just kinda died out. Luckily we got picked up by someone else RCA Records. Everything is going great. The recordings are done, just some little details on the artwork need to be worked out. We definitely have a lot of artistic freedom on this one. My voice was different, I wanted to explore different ranges.
Something that we can truly call our own. Chad Elliott: At that period of time I wanted to explore my roots and the music that I listened to growing up. I wanted to be in a rock band, an alternative band.
Before we even started FP, a band we all listened to as kids was Modest Mouse. The angsty-ness of it all, living in Whittier and trying to get out.
I wanted to hone in on that and bring those feelings into the music. Catchy, but tough. James Torres: Now we realize we could have done all that shit anyways. We were just being selfish, essentially. We get it now.
Back then, if somebody suggested something, you just rejected it because it was them suggesting it. Dylan Miller: Everyone was gripping. But everyone still show up. Ninety-five percent of the time, everyone as still in there trying to get it going, 9 to 5, five days a week. It was the touring. It made us resent each other.
Chad Elliott: Personally, I was going through a lot of different changes. I finally made the decision to move to New York. The good thing is, New York taught me how to be an adult. Chad Elliott: Not really. A lot of the music I was writing was instrumental … shoegazing, electronic, ambient stuff.
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