Motion City Soundtrack

Motion City Soundtrack makes friends almost everywhere they go. From Blink 182 bassist/vocalist Mark Hoppus, who recently produced MCS’ second album Commit This To Memory (due out June 7), to Fall Out Boy frontman Patrick Stumph, the Minneapolis five-piece not only impresses fans at its live shows, but brings a level of enthusiasm that’s immediately infectious to other bands and musicians. Since starting in 1997, the band’s pop-punk Moog mayhem has only continued to grow, giving them opportunities to play the last three installments of the Vans Warped Tour, where they will spend the majority of this summer as well, premiering their ever-energetic new songs, and continuing to strengthen the music community that has helped them share the music they love. Recoil spent nearly an hour interviewing MCS vocalist/guitarist Justin Pierre and then guitarist Josh Cain via phone, compiling some of the best moments of both conversations below.

Recoil: How did you go about discussing working further with Mark Hoppus while on tour with Blink 182 in Europe and Japan? Was it something just spontaneous?
Justin Pierre: Well, it started out with us just being friends with Atticus and getting clothes from them. One of the guys that works there, his name is Brendan Klein, he’s become a really good friend of ours. He’s a rad dude. We’re almost same age buddies. I think there’s a year between us, that’s about it. He had our record and I guess played it for Mark once and Mark freaked out and liked it and the first thing we really heard of it was, I think it was in Spin or Rolling Stone, there was this little blurb where he said, ‘Yeah, I like this band Motion City Soundtrack.’ And he said a few nice words about us and I was like, ‘Wow, that’s so crazy.’ Then, I don’t know if we asked for the tour or if they asked us to do the first tour, in Europe. I don’t know, it just happened. So when we were out there, he sort of broke the ice pretty fast because I think he hid in our dressing room. I think he was hiding from press. [Laughs] Out of nowhere he just pops out of this closet and he’s like ‘Yeah, I think it’s a great idea!’ And then he just walks out so it was weird. So he’s just very nice and normal and goofy and weird. Kind of like us. [The idea of Mark producing] started with Josh, since he knows more about music stuff than I do, like I don’t know anything about recording and all of that. So he and Mark kind of geeked out and he was just asking Mark about producers and stuff. He figured, ‘Well, shit, this guy’s worked with a ton of rad people, he must know, since he likes us and knows what we’re like, who we’d work well with.’ And so he gives some names and stuff and just happens to mention that he had purchased all of the equipment for Blink’s last record, so he had all of this equipment at home and he was looking to get into producing, but, and then he just kind of trailed off, and Josh asked him why and he said for lack of talent, but he was kind of joking. He was like, ‘No, I’m just lazy. Whatever.’ And so that was like halfway through the tour and then on the last night of the tour we just asked him if he would be interested in producing our record and he said, ‘Fuck yeah!’ It was weird. It was like, ‘Yeah, okay, let’s do this.’ We didn’t even really think about it. Everyone was like, that’s interesting, because he had never produced anything and he hadn’t heard any of our new stuff. He said yeah based on us and our old stuff, which was amazing for us because that means more than anything really. So, yeah, we just kind of dove into it and that’s how it happened.

R: What was it like working with Mark as a producer? How was it different from when you worked with Ed Rose before on your debut I Am The Movie?
Josh Cain: The way to look at Ed is that he is more of a facilitator, more of like a band boot camp. He doesn’t necessarily probably want to be that guy at all, but he will take a band that has promise and really take the goodness and make it happen. Going in there, I thought I was a pretty good guitar player, leaving I realized I was a pretty shitty guitar player. You know what I mean. With Ed, [he] put us through a boot camp and made us make a great record. But we weren’t as good as our record leaving that studio. And I think it taught us a lesson on how to be when we record. It was a pretty brutal process to take that much criticism about your playing, but it was a learning experience, learning that it doesn’t really matter going along, what matters is the record. And going in with Mark, Mark’s a laid back, positive man. And he already likes and trusts our abilities and everything. He just goes in and basically goes, ‘I like this song, I like these parts, I want to try this here if you guys want to. If you don’t, that’s cool. Or maybe you have another idea. I think you should do something here.’ He was just a positive reinforcement the entire time. His ideas were great launching pads to launch our ideas off of. It just worked out really well. He always would say, ‘Thanks for writing amazing songs. I don’t really have to do anything except put my name on this thing.’ He was always very humble about his work, but I think he’s really rad. We hired Ryan Hewitt, the guy who engineered the Blink record, with [Mark’s] blessing, he’s the one who wanted him, and I’m thankful for him because the sounds that are there had a lot to do with Ryan Hewitt and his ability to get a good guitar sound. Mark would come in and be like, ‘Oh yeah, tweak that a little bit. I want a different snare sound.’ Or ‘That’s out of tune, redo that.’ [Laughs] Mark was the guy who would catch all the bad stuff. It was just really positive. He was really fun.

R: You also have Patrick Stumph from Fall Out Boy and the guys from Limbeck join you on the new song “Everything is Alright.” How close would you say the extended music scene you’re in is? Do you feel like you’re all bringing each other up?
JP: It’s weird. I remember seeing at least Patrick at some of our shows in Chicago. Like that’s really weird. We played a show with their band a long time ago when Fall Out Boy opened for us at a place called Dead Plains. It was like a movie theater or something. Patrick remembers the show really well. I think I got shocked by my mic. But yeah, it was weird because I got a call from Sean O’Keefe, who recorded our split [CD] with Schatzi, and he was the one who recorded Fall Out Boy’s first record, and he’d heard that Patrick really wanted me to sing on the record and they were holding it for me. So we played a show in Chicago at The Metro I believe it was, and then I basically got in a car with Sean, we drove to the studio and they had to have all of the stuff to where they were… I think it was mixed, but they had to get it mastered. So he had this song and he played it for me and then I quickly wrote the part for ‘Chicago is so Two Years Ago,’ and then sang and my voice was trashed. I don’t know how he did it, but somehow Sean made my voice sound not so trashed on the recording. I hadn’t really talked to Patrick or any of the other guys that much before that. Just a few phone conversations. Then after that, we played a few shows together and see each other every once in a while and come out to each other’s shows. So when we were in L.A. as sort of payback to Patrick, we asked him to sing on our record. And his voice is just fucking amazing. I hate him for how good he is.

R: How do you feel about going back out with the Warped Tour yet again this summer? How different have each of your experiences with the tour been?
JC: The first time we did the tour, Drive Thru Records gave us three dates on it, so I don’t know if you want to call that a year. So three dates, eight dates, half the tour, and then this year it’s two-thirds of the tour. It only gets better. Obviously, us getting a little more sizable as a band, it rocks when we play and there’s a big audience there. We have a little more comfort level, like riding in a bus. So the experience becomes a lot better now. The first experience was like, ‘I’m gonna die.’ [Laughs] The three-day thing where you’re driving in the van by yourselves with no money and you didn’t get catering, it was like, ‘I can’t see us doing this more than three days. It’s killing us.’ And then the next year we did the same thing where we drove ourselves in our van and it just gets really hard. And last year, it was the first bus we had ever gotten in the States. It just gets easier. And like the community is amazing. This year, there’s so many bands that we’ve grown with, playing tiny little holes in the wall to now. Like there’s Fall Out Boy, playing tiny little shows in Chicago where they’d be the opening band, to now where they’ve just sold over one hundred thousand records in two weeks.

R: The last time Recoil spoke with Motion City Soundtrack we talked movies, so how has film continued to influence or inspire you?
JP: I think we’re all big movie freaks, in our own ways. Like [drummer] Tony [Thaxton] can remember anybody’s name. I’m usually better remembering who worked on what films. Whereas Josh knows who produced what records, I know who directed and wrote and produced what films. I’ve always enjoyed words, I’ve always enjoyed writing stories, but I don’t think I could ever write a novel because it’s just too much to figure out. Like sometimes when I’m reading, like most of the books I choose to read, I really like the way they flow, but every once in a while there’s a book where it’s just wrong. Like it just doesn’t work, and I’m like, ‘Wow, this is bad writing.’ I don’t know how I would be able to write well. But I have recently. I’ve written a couple short stories. I wrote a little blurb for this thing where a bunch of musicians were asked to write something for Revolution on Canvas and I got to write something really quick for that. And then recently I just wrote a story about working at Red Lobster. Anyway, I’m getting off subject. The point is writing songs I guess is like writing miniature stories. Like a three-minute movie, a three-minute story. I can’t think of the word, but it’s the place where I can actually write well, maybe not well, but I have the capacity to write a three-minute story, as opposed to writing a novel or making a movie or something. It just works and I guess that’s what I’ve been able to do as a writer.

R: So, does the future still freak you out, or do you think everything is going to be all right?
JP: I don’t know. Almost everybody in a band has these goddamn flip phones. I forget what they’re called. There’s a name for them. But I don’t understand that stuff. I don’t understand technology and I don’t know if I ever will. I feel like I’m already way too far behind and I just wish I could go to school and have somebody teach me everything all at once. I think I’m going to be in my own sort of era. It takes place in the present time, but in a different dimension. And I’m happy with that kind of thought.

June 2005