Interviews

Band Interviews: Cartel - 8.25.2005

AP: First off thanks for taking the time to do this interview, we really appreciate it. Let's get the formalities out of the way - please tell us your name and what you do in the band.

Will: I'm Will, and I'm the singer.

AP: I know it just started a week ago, but how has the "Take Cove" tour been so far?

Will: It's been great. We've had really great shows every night. The fans have been awesome, and we really couldn't ask for more from a tour, other than like 80,000 people a night, but that's asking a lot.

AP: What bands on the tour have you enjoyed watching?

Will: Every band on the tour is great - they all bring their individual sound, which is nice, you know? Augustana's got the more laid-back approach, and Panic! At the Disco's got that new electronic thing that's going on, which is really nice. It's all refreshing. Everything's different enough where you're not hearing the same band every time.

AP: Congratulations on finishing your first full length, Chroma - how does it feel to have it done and what expectations do you have for the CD?

Will: It feels great to be done. There's certain times when you just feel almost sad that you're finished with it cause it's been so much fun and such a great experience so far, that not being able to continue recording, to continue building the songs, is kind of like watching your babies go off to college. But no, it's been great. What was the other part of the question?

AP: Expectations.

Will: Oh, right. Expectations. I mean, yeah, we expect the CD will take us pretty far. Unfortunately, most of those expectations are hinged upon other people's actions, so I mean, as much as we expect something or would want something to go, it's not really up to us. All we can do is play shows every night. Do our job. Play our shit. Play it right. Do a good show. Hang out with the fans, you know? That's our job. Other than that, everything's left up to somebody else.

AP: What was the recording process for Chroma like?

Will: It was awesome. It was a lot more calculated than I think a lot of albums really have to go down, as we didn't really have a lot of time to do it. So really like every song had to be planned out just rigorously before we went in. So it was really strained I guess, there was a lot of stress - we were all stretched for time, there was a lot of pressure, other than the fact people wanting us to deliver a good full length at that, and then you know having the small amount of time as it is, it was just great that we got it done so efficiently and so well. Zach and Kenneth are great producers, and we had a wonderful time working with them.

AP: What are you most proud about regarding Chroma?

Will: I would say it's the level of maturity we brought out in the songs. You know from the EP, I think it really took a big step up. (Note: my tape recorder fucked up right here, so I missed out on the last part of his answer, sorry about that!)

AP: How does Cartel go about writing songs? Does one person bring in the basic structure and then have everyone else "Cartel"-ify it, or is it more of a collaborative effort from the start?

Will: It's different for every song, obviously. Everything comes in different ways, but I mean, for the most part on the record, I would bring in basic skeletal songs: a verse, chord progression, chorus, melody, things like that. I wrote the lyrics and the melody, so that had a lot to do with it. And the album is very vocal heavy, so obviously you can see that influence. But yeah, all the songs went through what we like to call the "Cartel filter," and they never would have been the same from the demos, the early demos that no one's heard. You can definitely see the difference between what it started as and where it ended up. It's pretty much how it rolls down, but there are a couple songs on the record that everybody had everything to do with.

AP: Speaking of demos, did you guys have any songs or riffs that were laying around for a while, or are all the songs off Chroma totally new?

Will: The old demos were different. None of them were really old things. I mean, there were songs from last year that we used. Like, "Say Anything (Else)," and "Settle Down," and of course “Honestly" were all written last summer, so I mean as far as being old, I guess you can kind of throw those in there, but those were all written with new riffs. Yeah, there was really nothing and we actually had to scrap a lot of riffs, as you would know from the "Runaway" demo. (Talking about the bridge riff of the old demo of "Runaway" that Will did by himself on his computer).

AP: I miss that riff so much - I had been praying for it to be on the album version.

Will: Trust me - trust me when I say it wouldn't have worked on record. It worked on the demo because of where the song went after the demo, but it just wouldn't have worked on record.

AP: I read an interview where you said you guys said you don't force a song to revolve around an awesome riff - you favor the songs as a whole and would rather save riffs for other songs where they might fit in even better.

Will: Right. Well I think that's what happened with "Runaway." It's a pretty basic song coming up to that part, with the melody and the way everything works. It's very, very simple - probably the simplest song on the album. And getting to that part, and then going to that riff, you're kind of going "Oh ok, right on, now we can rock out." We didn't want to overshadow the rest of the song with a really good riff in the middle, I think. I mean, that's happened a lot before in songs before - not with us, but just in general, and I think that's a bad songwriting technique. I think the best riff should be the riff you use most, so we're going to take that riff, having stumbled upon a really great one, and use it for another song.

AP: So can we definitely expect to see that riff in a new Cartel song?

Will: I'm sure you will. That's a riff that both guitarists in the band are really fond of. It's a very unique sounding riff compared to the rest of the stuff.

AP: Did you guys run into any problems while either writing or recording Chroma? Any writer's block or technical difficulties in the studio - anything like that?

Will: Really, no. I mean, if we had any technical difficulties in the studio, we wouldn't have finished in time. Writer's block, I don't know. There was a lot of pressure with Andy not being in the band. He had written half the songs on the EP, and really the EP is all people had to go on. And I'm sure people had their own expectations of how Chroma would turn out. But really it was a huge, huge burden on us to deliver after that. Even though Andy was just one small part in the band, he definitely brought riffs, and is definitely a great songwriter. I think that feeling that pressure, there was a little bit of a stall at the beginning when everybody kind of freaked out, not knowing what we wanted - different people not really liking the early stuff. The great part about it is once we got done with the finished product, everyone's really proud of it, and that's really what it comes down to.

AP: How did you guys go about writing the beautiful, epic last track "A" - more specifically, where did the inspiration come from, how'd you keep track of all the parts when you were writing it, and how do you even go about recording something like that?

Will: That was actually the easiest song, make no bones about it. We had the idea of what we wanted to do, and really wanted to leave it up to be a studio song. When we got around to it, we knew what we wanted to do. We kind of wanted to end the album with an ellipsis, where you can be expecting other things and not just really closing it off. But really, we worked up to the song in practice, in rehearsal before the album, to get to the part where the chorus of "Save Us" and everything was coming in. Then after that, we just kind of said "All right, that's when we'll mess with it in the studio." In the studio, we needed a couple parts to keep going. We knew what we were gonna do, and just really sat down and worked it. The inspiration, I would say, would come from, and probably everybody's gonna hate me for talking shit on this song, but we were listening to "Goodbye Sky Harbor" on Jimmy Eat World's Clarity. I LOVE that song, don't get me wrong. I love it. And I always felt when it got to the end, when all the vocal parts came in - it was just the vocals, and then they started speeding up and it got faster, and I thought that part was just amazing. But that five minutes or whatever it is before that, I felt, as a song, that that didn't really work. But that obviously wasn't their purpose. You could tell that's just what they wanted to do. With us, we wanted to create a track with movements where everything moved around. I think taking the idea that they did something like that and saying "OK, now let's build on that and move it further." Then we kind of came up with the idea with what we wanted to do with that. And we all had the idea we wanted to bring in different choruses of different songs and put them together and see how we could mesh them, and I think it was really awesome. It was really just a bunch of experimentations and kind of, first takes, and going "That's cool" and keeping it.

AP: I love that part right when you say "When what you want is what you're getting" - the kind of spacey background thing, I don't know how to describe it.

Will: That whole part after that is my favorite. That's where, for me, the song just gives me the goosebumps, I love that part - that was real fun to record.

AP: How'd you decide to use the sort of "Cher"/techno/pitch-shifted vocals on that song?

Will: I mean, honestly, I heard Copeland's Christmas song from last year, "Can You Hear What I Hear?" And when he got to that part in the middle where he does the high thing - that part to me, I was like "Damn it! Somebody got to it first!" I just think that's fun. Obviously it's not like a skill to be able to do that. All you do is just throw your voice around and auto-tune grabs it. We just wanted to do a hard auto-tune part and really make it - it's electronic already, and you might as well take it as far as you can go, and that’s pretty much as far as you can take it without going over the line. Well, some people might disagree.

AP: Speaking of auto-tune, I heard that you didn't use auto-tune for the majority of Chroma.

Will: 98% of Chroma is not auto-tuned. The backup vocals are auto-tuned in certain places, just because we had 8 days to record 12 tracks, and that's just not gonna happen.

AP: One AP user was like "I can't listen to this band - they're auto-tuned to hell" blah blah blah, so that's a pretty good compliment, I guess, in a weird way.

Will: No, it was a great compliment. I read that and just laughed - I was like, I mean, cool. As for the backup vocals, if we had a month to record mostly vocals, then yeah, I could sit there and do the whole thing without auto tune. It's not really that hard if you can actually focus your energy in the studio. I mean, the next record, I hope to be able to just say the whole thing is without auto-tune. It's one of those things, everybody's always just like "Oh, he uses auto tune", it’s such a "bad" word - auto tune is really just another production tool. You tune guitars, you tune your drums to sound good. It's a point of fact. Nobody's perfect. Well, some people are perfect, but not anybody we've heard recently.

AP: Here's a quick question from an AP user: where did the line "Our days were numbered by nights on too many rooftops" in the song "Burn This City" come from.

Will: We were kind of hoodlums in Conyers when we were growing up, and we actually used to get on top of an elementary school rooftop, and just sit on there. I mean, it's not like an inspirational point in our lives, but that song is really about us getting out of a small town and people telling us we couldn't do it, and that was just kind of a lyrical ploy to put it on there. But it is true; we actually did spend nights on rooftops: everyone in the band will vouch.

AP: Speaking of AP users, a lot of people have asked about "Save Us" and why the melody kind of changed. A lot of people seem to be attached to the old version.

Will: Well really, that's the downfall of demos. That song, being as we're not a piano band (I'm not fuckin' Billy Joel), that was the first piano song I've written. And was really just from being at Joseph's house and he had a piano, and just messing around on the piano, and I came up with that "Saaave us" melody, then I was like "OK, that's gold. I love that." Really, I just started working with that, and never really was able to belt it at his house, but kind of did, and said "Ok, I might be able to hit that." But when we did the demo version in the studio, the producer recorded the piano on his computer so that we could go and demo it and not have to spend an hour trying to record piano. You know, we had five hours to do all the demos, and I sat there and busted it out, and I mean, yeah it works in the studio, but we all had a conscious decision to say that we'd rather be able to pull it off live every night than mess it up every night and still have the same melody on record. And I'm not an accomplished piano player, and we definitely want to be able to pull it off. Being that the original song is in C, we had to move it to G in order to keep as little black keys out of it as possible, so that I'm not bumbling all over the piano when we're playing it live, and so I can kind of rock on the white keys and make it easy for myself. If Paul McCartney did it, I have no shame admitting it. So that's why we had to move it down four steps, and I really think that I'm able to sing it better though. I don't really think that there's that much more emotion, I just think it's really just me going in "please don't fuck this up" mode, and having to hit it. And I think with this version, at the end especially, I think it allows you really to showcase the vocals, rather than just like "This is high as I can sing and I really can't get higher than this but I'm just going to stay on this note because this is as much as I can get and impress you." But yeah, I really like the fact that I can actually really sing it, instead of having to gut it.



AP: That about wraps it up. Thanks so much for the interview, we really appreciate it and wish you the best of luck with the rest of the "Take Cover" tour and with the release of Chroma. Do you have anything you’d like to say to the readers of absolutepunk.net?

Will: Thanks for all the support. Everything we read in the comments is totally well received, and we take criticism very well. We love you guys and we love everybody who's been supporting us on AP - continue to do so, that's really awesome. As much as we've kind of taken over the web site - it's pretty sweet, don't get me wrong - but sorry for annoying anyone who's not really a fan of Cartel. And to the kid who thinks we're buying off Tate, we didn't give him shit because we don't have anything. I swear to god if we had any money, we wouldn't be able to pay him anyway. Thanks once again for the support though, and we'll see you soon.