[an interview i did with the drummer of against me! was published in a february '08 issue of the wake. because the internet is really cool and you can write long things without having to worry about paper and space, here's an uncut transcript of that interview.]

Transcript of my 1/31/08 (approximately 4:30 PM) phone conversation with Warren Oaks, drummer of Against Me!

He is a very nice dude with a very nice beard and was very nice to me.

Warren: Hello?

Deniz: Hey, I’m glad I caught you.

W: Yeah, I’m actually in the middle of bowling right now, how’s it going?

D: It’s going good, how much time do I have to talk to you?

W: Whatever you need, I’ve got time to chat between bowls if you don’t mind.

D: Yeah, no problem. I’d like to start by saying that your beard is like a beacon of inspiration for me and always has been.

W: Well thank you very much.

D: This is going to sound like a generic, filler-type question but I’m actually really interested: What records are you into right now, like what are you listening to?

W: Uh, let’s see. Right now I’m on a bit of an instrumental music kick, so I’ve been going back into the vaults and listening to a lot of Do Make Say Think, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Tristeza, Six Parts Seven. Those four have been on pretty heavy rotation. I’m also into some Minneapolis bands, actually, like Plastic Constellations. And Awesome Snakes, of course.

D: I really like the artwork Steak Mtn’s been doing for you.

W: I just got a nine, by the way.

D: Congratulations.

W: Thank you, thank you. I’m gonna try to pick up a spare here real quick.

[conspicuous absence of pin-falling noise]

W: I didn’t get it.

D: You guys go back a little with Steak Mtn, right?

W: Yeah, he’s originally from Florida, the Tampa area, and I grew up in Sarasota so I’ve actually known the dude for quite some time. As a band we’ve been working with him since he designed a cover for a 7-inch we put out on No Idea.

D: I actually found out about Against Me! and combatwoundedveteran at the same time.

W: We coexisted for a little while but we never shared a stage with them or anything.

D: I found out about both of you guys way back from the No Idea website.

W: I remember seeing them play a house show with a bunch of local grind bands, and it took them longer to set up than to play their set. Which I thought was kinda awesome.

D: That sounds just like them. So you guys are touring pretty much all the time, right?

W: Yeah, last year we played nearly 200 shows, and with travel days and days off on tour it ended up being about 250 days away from home, and we were mixing our record some of that time. The actual time at home totally off was minimal, a lot of the time at home we’re practicing, or writing, or rehearsing, working on transitions between songs and stuff like that. It’s definitely a full-time job.

D: What’s that like on your life, do you just not exist outside the band?

W: It’s made me realize who I’m really close with. Any peripheral relationships don’t last, people who you’re really tight with are the only ones left standing. They’re very patient people, thankfully, and they appreciate what they can get from us, which is nice enough.

D: What’s it like being on Sire?

W: It’s been really great so far, actually. They’ve been very supportive, and they’ve been good to their word. They pretty much let us do our thing and support us in that. They haven’t really tried to intervene or steer the band in any way, they’ve just gotten behind us. We say we want to do this tour with these bands and they say alright cool do it, and we say we want to put out this 7-inch with these songs on it and they say alright fine. We’re still functioning the way that we’ve always functioned as a band, and they are just funding it, pretty much.

D: On the We’re Never Going Home DVD you seem to be lampooning major labels and their scouts. What changed between then and your deal with Sire?

W: The courtship process, the way that all those labels were coming at us, was totally ridiculous, and I didn’t say anything at that time that I would take back, or that I regret. It just came to the point where we felt like they were the label that we wanted to distribute our music, and we really believed they were the best choice for us, and to not do it because we were afraid of what people might think or because we were worried about some backlash that might come or because we wanted to cater to people… I think what it really came down to was that we didn’t want to spend our lives haunted by what-ifs, and we didn’t want to take anybody’s word for it. We’re one of the last bands, probably, to have gotten a major label record deal of the old school. Now every single label’s trying to find bands and get a piece of the touring revenues, get a piece of everything that they do as a band, and we were one of the last bands to just get a record deal. We felt that the timing was right, and that it was the only chance we’d really have to have this experience, so we just decided to go for it. It’s our only life so we figured take the experience while we still have the chance.

D: How was working with Butch Vig, was it different from other producers you’ve worked with?

W: He was great. We definitely let him get more involved than we ever let the producer get before. We actually spent some time with him during pre-production, which we’ve never done, just playing the songs and sharing a practice space with him. I was playing with a click track and trying all different speeds to play the songs at, to find what the ideal paces for different parts were, and working out all the transitions so we could make sure everything was smooth. He was involved in the whole process, which we’ve never done before, and it was rad. We definitely became friends in the process and it was a really fun, educational experience.

D: On the old Against Me! Records a lot of the songs have really catchy, prominent drumbeats, like I recognize songs like “I Still Love You Julie” and “We Laugh At Danger (And Break All The Rules)” by the drumbeats, but I don’t hear that as much on the new record. It seems like the drums are a lot less prominent in the songwriting. What’s your involvement in the songwriting process?

W: It was definitely a different approach with this record. The record was written while we were on tour, so there weren’t any songs that came from just jamming or fucking around. Tom wrote all the songs and gave them to us all written and arranged. The progressions and the lyrics were all written out. All of us added our own contributions, but on previous records it was a different approach. We had time off to work on the songs together. For sure there’s always been songs that Tom wrote from start to finish, but for this album he wrote all the songs, and we figured them out while we were moving, practicing at sound check.

D: I see you getting a lot of acclaim for your new record, but always in places like Spin and Rolling Stone, showing up on year-end lists with Jay-Z and Radiohead and Kanye West and the like, and I don’t see you showing up in less mainstream journals anymore, but the places like Spin are always calling your album the “punk” album of the year. That seems bizarre to me because as far as I can tell you’ve tried your best to distance yourself musically and lyrically from that scene and succeeded, but now the pop press that’s covering you won’t let go of the idea of you as a punk band. How do you feel about the press you’re getting and how it’s different from the press you used to get?

W: I think it’s kinda interesting, I wonder actually how any of the old records would’ve been received if we had been on the radar of these magazines. I feel like they weren’t even aware of our existence before, so to them we’re kinda coming out of nowhere, and I think compared to most of the bands on their radar we definitely are really rough around the edges and we definitely aren’t as slick and polished as a lot of the bands that they’re hearing. It’s an interesting phenomenon. I’ll be doing an interview and they’ll say, “So you guys are a new band, huh?” and it’s like, “Well, I’ve been in this band for seven years.”

D: “You know, we’re on our fourth album…”

W: Yeah. For a lot of people we’re totally coming out of nowhere. It’s interesting to talk to people who say, “I think you really sound like Nirvana!” or “This is the punkest thing I’ve heard all year!” and you just have to wonder what their context is, what other bands they’re listening to.

D: One of my friends brought home a copy of Spin magazine and I was flipping through the album of the year list and it was everything I expected to see right up to the #1, and then it’s you guys with a full-page spread, capping a list with nothing that sounds even remotely like you. It was just bizarre.

W: Yeah, that was kinda bizarre for me too. It’s definitely flattering, because it’s not just one person’s opinion but a lot of people at the magazine who are listening to a lot of different things and really engaged in music and really considering everything that came out. A lot of people would write it off but I take it as a compliment, for sure.

D: I want to talk about your new album, New Wave, and a lot of my questions have to do with the lyrics, which might be unfair to ask you about considering that you didn’t write them but I figure you can at least give it a shot, right?

W: Yeah, I might not be able to field them that accurately, but you can try.

D: I’m saying this in the spirit of the song “Piss and Vinegar,” in particular the line “just say what you’re really thinking.” That song, which as far as I an tell makes fun of bullshit pop bands, has a line about publicity photos, and in the Spin spread there’s a full-page photo of you guys all hanging out in the woods or something, and it seems pretty ridiculous. Or like a lot of your lyrics now are about the silliness and stupidity of the music industry but then you’ve got Butch Vig dance remixes, which seems contradictory as well.

W: There’s certain things that we can control and certain things that we can’t. We’re pretty conscious of our own aesthetic, and we don’t want to be presented in a way that we think is cheesy. You don’t want somebody to make you look like a chump, and so we try to assert as much control as possible over what kind of photo shoots we do and how they come out, and have as much approval over as much of that as possible, but in the end, you take pictures with somebody for a couple hours and they’re gonna take the picture they want. There’s been dozens and dozens of times where we’ve been in a situation where we’ve been told, like, “Stand against this brick wall and you look over there and you pretend like you’re looking over there” and we’re just like, “No, we’re not doing this.” We’ve pulled the plug on tons and tons of situations like that where we could just feel that we were gonna get cheesed up. It’s constant maintenance. And I think Butch Vig making dance remixes of our songs is awesome. I listen to electronic music, and I would open our entire catalogue to anybody who wants to make any kind of remix of any of the songs. Whether they want to make some industrial song, or make a total rave song, I’m totally in favor of that, I think deconstructing music in that way is awesome. I’m definitely open to that. As far as how you come across in media presentations, how MTV will make you look, and magazines, it’s constant maintenance and it’s definitely not easy. It’s given me a newfound respect for bands like the White Stripes that invent a whole costume and fake story about themselves just so they can totally control how they’re presented. Even if it’s in a totally manufactured way it’s better than just letting somebody else make those decisions for you.

D: So it’s like a pitfall of your success, the PR stuff. What you have to deal with in return for being popular.

W: Well, I think you encounter that on any level. I’ve done interviews with tiny ‘zines and when I got a copy they ended up saying bizarre things about the band that I didn’t expect, and comparing us to bands we don’t like, and I couldn’t help feeling that they missed the point altogether. I think that it happens at any level. Sometimes when you’re talking to people you feel like they totally get it and it’s resonating, and sometimes you feel like, “Wow, they didn’t get it at all.”

D: It’s just a risk you take by being presented at all.

W: Yeah.

D: A lot of the songs on New Wave seem to be about stasis, about being ineffective, like “White People For Peace” about the ineffectuality of protest songs, or “Americans Abroad” with the line “while I hope I’m not like them, I’m not so sure.” It’s interesting that a lot of the record seems to be about feeling guilty and not knowing what’s right and not being able to make change, a lot of it seems even sort of bitter, and it’s admirable in a weird way that those things can be made into such catchy songs, but is there a point to it that I’m missing?

W: I appreciate that Tom’s been really careful about lyrics. There’s a big risk, especially as a band which a lot of young people listen to, that you can come across like you have all the answers, and you’re telling people what’s right. There’s certain bands that we’ve toured with that have come across like, “Okay here’s a political issue, here’s what’s wrong with the situation, and here’s the right way to respond to it.” They come out with this manifesto, like they’re presenting the answers to you. That’s something that has always rubbed us the wrong way. I’m much more interested in hearing a question posed in a new way that makes you go, “Hmm, that’s a interesting concept,” and turning it over in my mind myself than I am in hearing somebody say, like, “You know what sucks? The police, man, the police really suck.” I think that to put a question mark at the end of what you’re saying has more of a point than just coming out with blanket statement of like, “This sucks, this is right, this is wrong,” and so that’s something we’ve always shied away from. People have always said to us, “You’re a political band, you’ve gotta get involved in this organization and you’ve gotta get behind that cause,” but we don’t endorse anything besides the music that we make.

D: I agree completely. I was just thinking about your older lyrics compared to your new ones and they’re strikingly similar in that respect if not thematically. And I thought it was stupid even when I was 16 when all the punks had this huge backlash against you because you “weren’t anarchists anymore.”

W: You and me both. But I mean that’s coming back to the same thing: even when you feel like you’re totally connected with people and what you’re saying is totally resonating, when it comes down to it you find out that maybe they never really understood you in the first place. What they were taking away from it wasn’t necessarily what you were intending. I guess that’s one of the dangers of making any kind of art: you can’t follow your art around and monitor how it’s received. You create it and then you just have to let it go.

D: Like Ian MacKaye from Fugazi: “You see my mouth, and see that it’s moving, and say ‘hey man, I know where you’re coming from!’ Bullshit.”

W: Yeah, absolutely.

D: I have to admit that I’m not a fan of your new stuff. But the 16-year-old still hanging out inside of me who used to get all his friends together and gather around the drumset in his basement and pick up a guitar and yell all your songs at the top of his lungs really just wants you to tell mean old adult me why I’m wrong.

W: Haha, well, I don’t think you are. I think uh,

[pause, bowling pins crashing]

W: I hear it all the time. People say, “Your old stuff’s better, I like it more, I connected with it in this way,” and I think that there was an intersection of a time and a place when a lot of people were really ready for what we were doing exactly when we were doing it, and it connected with a lot of people in that really intense way, and I think for those people to expect us to be with them step for step as they evolve individually, and for us to evolve as a band on a parallel track with them and continue to connect with them in that intense way every step along the way is unrealistic. If there was a band that could do that, that could evolve with a generation, at every passing year to be like, “alright, here’s what we’re all thinking about this year, and this is what we’re all concerned about now, and these are the choices we’re being faced with today,” I just don’t…. I think it’s a little too much to ask for a band, especially because we haven’t been living a parallel life to a lot of the people who have been listening to our band. What we’ve been experiencing has been pretty different, and pretty bizarre for us, and a lot of the lyrics are talking about what we’ve encountered as a band and what we’ve been forced to think about: traveling and touring and working on records. A lot of people are like, “Wow, I used to really get where they were coming from and now I don’t” because they’re not in bands that tour 10 months out of the year, and a lot of the songs are coming from that place. I think that a lot of the lyrics are trying to find that universal common ground where you don’t have to be in a band to appreciate it, but at the same time it would be dishonest for us to talk about things that we aren’t living.

D: I think it’s always really depressing when bands just stay the same, album after album, and I really respect that you’re moving in new directions, whatever they may be.

W: Why thank you.

[long pause punctuated by bowling pins]

D: Well that’s all I have to ask you unless you have anything extra to add.

W: Um, well, how’s the weather right now in Minneapolis?

D: It is really fucking cold. It’s zero degrees, wind chill of -15, and when you go outside it’s like, “Oh, it’s really pleasant out!”

W: I’ll actually be there pretty soon, so I’ll be suffering with you.

D: Where are you playing at?

W: Oh, um, I’m not sure when we’re coming there on tour, but actually Minneapolis is my home away from home, I spend a lot of my downtime there.

D: I’ve always had a great time every time I’ve seen you at the Triple Rock.

W: Yeah, it’s a good place, good people, for sure. I love it.

D: Umm… Have you been doing well at bowling?

W: Not too well. I got a 109.

D: Well, you can blame me for this game.

W: Alright I will. Actually, I’m sorry, I didn’t even catch your name.

D: Oh, my name’s Deniz.

[bowling pins]

W: What is it?

D: Deniz.

W: Very nice to make your acquaintance.

D: Yeah, you too. I’ll see you next time you’re in town.

W: Yeah, absolutely, I’ll be there. Thank you very much. Thanks a lot for your time and for your interest and for your support. I definitely appreciate it.

D: Alright.

W: Take care. Stay warm.

D: I’ll do my best.

W: Bye.

Tags: Interview