extrawack! interview with The Hives

This past week saw the release of the highly anticipated new album from The Hives, The Black & White Album. Hives drummer Chris Dangerous gave us a call from the road to talk a bit about the new record, touring with Maroon 5, working with Timbaland & Pharrell, and getting rewarded for drunken plant-tossing in the Deep South.

extrawack!: I was just looking at The Hives Wikipedia entry, and it describes The Hives as having a 'punk-influenced garage rock" sound. Do you agree with that entry?

Chris: That’s OK I guess...I mean I’d like to it to say it’s Rock and roll, pretty much.

You guys are out on the road with Maroon 5 right now, which seems like a unlikely pairing...how did that happen?

You know, I think they wanted Tool on the tour...no, we’re actually labelmates, and I think they wanted a really good support band, and I think they got the best one.

Well, I’ve seen you play a few times in New York before, and and I’ve often thought, "I’d hate to have to play after those guys!"

That’s the thing most people think...never let The Hives support your band!

How are you going over at those shows, playing for people who wouldn’t normally get out to a Hives gig?

Exactly! That’s the thing. When we got the call for the tour, we thought that one of the things we really missed was playing for people who hadn’t heard us. When we headline, the moment we walk on the stage we’ve already won, you know? It’s really fun to have to fight for the audience to like you. We really like this tour for that reason. It takes us about two songs to get the audience on their feet, then eventually they are clapping and going bananas.

I just got a chance to listen to the new album, and I notice it’s got a more electronic sound than previous albums. Are you using synthesizers in your live show now as well?

No, so far we are not. We use a lot of petals for the guitars, but that’s it. We’ve always had synthesizers on the albums, but on the new one I guess you can tell that a little more since they are higher in the mix than usual.

Speaking of the mix and production, you guys worked with Timbaland and Pharrell in the last year or so. How did you hook up with them?

The Pharrell thing came about when we were in Japan, he came backstage and told us he loved us and wanted to work with us some day, so we remembered that when it came time to start the new album and just gave him a call. We worked with him for a few weeks in Miami.

With Timbaland, we worked on his record, then we recorded with him in Stockholm for our record, but none of it got finished in time so it didn’t make it onto this record.

I’ve heard you guys also worked with Jack White and The Raconteurs...is that true?

It’s sort of correct. We went to Nashville to see a Nashville Predators hockey game where Peter Forsberg was playing, and the next morning Pelle stopped by the studio where the Raconteurs were recording, and they needed to record the sounds of somebody’s footsteps walking across the floor. And that’s what Pelle did. He was the footsteps.

So his credit on the album is "Footstepper"?

Ha! Yes, that’s right.

I read recently that The Hives were presented the keys to the city of Oxford, Mississippi...how on earth did that happen?

I don’t know, because we sort of made fools of ourselves there! We got really drunk one night and took plants out of the pots in the city square and threw them around and stuff...but the mayor loved it, so we were presented with the keys. One each.

I noticed on your website that sometimes you refer to your fans as "Dorks and Dorkettes". Is that what you like to call them?

Not me, I didn’t write that. It sounds like something Nicolaus would say.

The Hives - "Tick Tick Boom":

extrawack! interview: Jimmy Eat World

In the midst of the release-week of their new album (which sits atop of the iTunes charts and will debut top-five in Billboard next week), Jimmy Eat World's Zach Lind checked-in to give us the scoop on touring and staying friends, recording in Mesa, and working with super-producer Butch Vig.

extrawack!: Your new album, Chase The Light, was produced by yourselves and Chris Testa, who is best known, I think, for his work with The Dixie Chicks. How did you hook up with him?

Zach: We met Chris in a studio in L.A. where we were doing some mixing, and Chris was an assistant there on some projects that we were sort of neighbors with, and he’d be in one studio and we’d be in another, and I think we just kind of popped in and started hanging out with the different people there, so we got to know Chris and thought that he was someone who we’d like to work with in the future. And we decided to make this new album in our home studio in Tempe, and we wanted to find someone who was young and excited about recording and was willing to come and live in Arizona for a long period of time...he ended up staying out here for about eight months. He was just a great fit, it worked out really well, and we loved working with Chris.

extrawack!: I see Butch Vig has an Executive Producer credit on this album...what was his involvement?

Zach: He was involved more heavily in the pre-production aspects of the record...giving kind of a direction and helping out with the direction of each tune and tightening things up. He came for about a week before we started, he stayed a little bit when we tracked drums, but he mostly stayed in L.A. and we would email him stuff that we’d been doing and he’d send us notes. He had one foot in the project and one foot out which was nice because he’d have an objective point of view. We really liked having him in that role.

extrawack!: The album, to me, sounds somehow more grander or bigger sounding than past albums. Is that just me, or is that something you went for?

Zach: Well, the songs lend themselves to sound a little more grandiose or whatever. We wanted the songs to have a lot of impact and we just kind of went for that and didn’t really shy away from it.

extrawack!: Something I really like about Jimmy Eat World albums is that they all close with kind of a grand finale epic song. I’m assuming that’s done by design...Is it difficult to come to a consensus in the band as to what track to end an album with?

Zach: Not really, I think it really wasn’t a big issue. On this album we thought we’d end with something opposite to that and it would be something almost very upbeat and pop and short. But I think there’s something in that we like to view the whole thing as an album with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Even though the songs have their own meaning, we like the albums to have their own feel of a story in their own way. And usually for us the song that leaves you with a certain musical reflection is the one that we put at the end, and "Dizzy" was one of those songs that felt like if we put it anywhere else on the album it would feel out of place and so we kind of went with it and stuck with the formula.

extrawack!: It’s a nice punctuation mark...

Zach: Well, yeah, that’s kind of the way we like to do it, you know? But at the end of the day people get the record and re-sequence it however they want. The sequence seems to be sort of a lost art, but something we pay attention to when we put together the album.

extrawack!: You guys scored Platinum and Gold status on your last couple of albums. Given the current state of the music business, do you think those kinds of sales are within your reach, or have you had to switch-up your game-plan at all?

Zach: I don’t know, we don’t need to necessarily switch-up our game plan...we’re gonna sell what we sell. I think we’ve been a band for about fifteen years now and I think the majority of people who know us have decided if they like us or they don’t, so who knows?

extrawack!: Jimmy Eat World are known in the industry for being "road dogs", and I see you have plans to tour until 2009...and I know that you and Jim have been friends since you were little kids. How have you guys figured out to be together so much, without getting on each others nerves to the point where you all have to take separate tour buses like Motley Crue?

Zach: I think for us, we’ve never really gotten on each others nerves that much. I think the fact that we were all friends before we started the band helps in that regard. I don’t think there’s any issue that comes along that we get worked up about or to the point that we are angry at each other about. I think the cool thing about our band is that everyone is giving it their all, whether it’s in the studio or performing...that’s all you can really expect from each other, so after that, there’s really not much to fight over. We have a pretty easy time of getting along.

Jimmy Eat World - "Big Casino", from Chase The Light:

interview: CAKE's Vince DiFiore

On the eve of the release of CAKE’s new rarities & b-sides album, extrawack! spoke with the maker of perhaps the most recognizable brass sound in rock, trumpet player Vince DiFiore, about the perils of self-releasing music after years on a major label, and being in a band that stands for things above and beyond just record sales.

extrawack!: You guys have left a long relationship with Sony and are releasing a B-sides and rarities album and then a live album on your own..Has doing it all outside of the confines of a major label been much different for you?

Vince DiFiore: Not really. It’s about the same...and it’s a little more comforting because if you mess up it’s your fault and not someone else’s. If you like to be in control and call the shots, it’s actually a little bit less stressful. We did have to hire our own publicists, and things like that. There are some pieces and things that we had to do that the record company would have automatically done for us before. That stuff was kind of minor compared to the mixing, mastering, and getting the album art together. So yeah, it’s really been about the same.

ew!: Was it good to know there’d be no meddling from label people?

VD: Actually, we’ve never had much of that, since our first album was a success they’ve trusted us from the beginning...they liked the art work, they liked how the albums were produced...they really didn’t bother us that much. Both Capricorn and Columbia had been very respectful about how we do things. But as far as pressures from label people, I don’t think that’ll ever be a problem for us because music listeners will be our best judges and will tell us what’s good or not.

We’ve never really taken the major labels for granted, and I think we are able to do this because we’ve built a strong base of fans through putting out our records through major labels and years of touring, but right now with music practically being free due to downloading and record sales being so low unless you are a finalist on American Idol, it just made a lot of sense to take things into our own hands and maybe sell less records but have that feeling that we took the bull by the horns.

ew!: Since you’ve already gone through the motions of setting up your own label, do you see yourselves releasing other artists on your label as well?

VD: No, not really. It’s just for our records. I guess it could happen, but we don’t want to let anyone down...that’s a big responsibility! We saw what kind of let down can happen with a label when we turned in Comfort Eagle, a record we had really done a great job on...but they had bigger fish to fry, like Beyonce or something like that...but that’s the kind of responsibility we would have, and I don’t think we’d want the responsibility of sitting on something that’s really good. This is all sort of experimental for us. If it goes well, we’ll put out another one of our own records. If the experiment goes poorly, we might have to look at something else. But we’re doing the best we can to service our own record right now...we don’t want to do a bad job on someone else’s, just a good job on ours.

ew!: CAKE has long been known for not being afraid of speaking out on social issues, and your website is always full of interesting tips and info to challenge and inspire your fans. Are the thoughts on your website agreed upon by the whole band? Do you guys ever disagree on what gets posted up there?

VD: John (McCrea) runs the news by me, and very rarely do I say, "Gosh, that’s really bad, or distasteful, or maybe not true", but John runs it past me and the person who administers our site, so we do agree on that stuff for the most part.

ew!: You guys haven’t put out a studio album since Pressure Chief over two years ago...any plans on another?

VD: Yeah, we’re planning on starting another one in the fall, which by the time it’s done and ready would mean it would be out sometime around September or October of next year. There’s no real schedule, and we’ll make sure we take the time to do it right.

CAKE’s B-Sides and Rarities, featuring a scratch & sniff cover (!!) is due for release any day now ("as soon as the discs arrive" according to the band) and is available directly from CAKE here.

Catch CAKE live:
8/17/07
Del Mar Concert Series @ The Del Mar Racetrack
Del Mar, CA

9/14/07
Monolith Festival @ Red Rocks Amphitheater
Morrison, CO

CAKE - "War Pigs" mp3