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Home  Archive music profiles Life, Liberty, and the Concept Album: A Chat with BRMC's Robert Turner
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Life, Liberty, and the Concept Album: A Chat with BRMC's Robert Turner |
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Written by Joel Lapp
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Friday, 16 December 2005 |
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Sometimes things can slow down and you can get inside your head and
just kind of over-think it, and I think that we just wanted to keep
that energy and focus through the whole record.
San Francisco band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club first got together as a
band in 1998, heading to L.A. the following year to record their
self-titled debut. The album gained critical acclaim, and they landed
some heavy rotation on college airwaves and MTV2 with the anthem
“Whatever Happened to My Rock ’n Roll (Punk Song).”
Comparisons to bands like the Jesus and Mary Chain brought a lot of
attention to their live shows, and they’ve toured extensively in the
past few years. In September, BRMC released their latest album, Take
Them On, On Your Own, adding a darker, more threatening sound (and
lyrics) to the heavy distortion on the first album. Playback St. Louis
caught up with vocalist and guitarist Robert Turner for a conversation
about concepts, politics, and Americana music.
Your fans are
familiar with the fuzzy tones and distorted sound on Take Them On, On
Your Own, but the overall feel of the album is darker and even more
menacing than your first album. Was that a mood you hoped to inject in
the album while you were recording?
Well, that wasn’t a concept or
anything. I think when we let it be whatever it was supposed to be. We
didn’t try to skew the record to be one way or another, and the songs
that we’d been writing together on stage and on the road…that’s the
feeling that was coming across then, and we weren’t gonna change it.
The only thing we tried to conceptualize in some way is to keep an
energy and direct kind of raw sound that we had on the road. You know,
we were on the road so long playing and things changed a bit. We got a
bit tougher and more forceful with the sound, and we didn’t want to
lose that feeling in a record, because sometimes that can slip away.
Sometimes things can slow down and you can get inside your head and
just kind of over-think it, and I think that we just wanted to keep
that energy and focus through the whole record.
Was it difficult to capture that live sound and energy in the studio?
Yeah, it’s hard to think about it like that. All you want to do is
sound like yourself on record and sometimes that’s the hardest thing in
the world to pull off—just to make it sound natural like you’re just
standing in the room with the band, and the way we play isthe way it
sounds. You work harder to not fall back on just doing whatever you
want and just coming out with whatever random sound comes. Because you
can do that. You can play around with tone, you can play around with
effects, and you can get some bizarre other-worldly mix, but that
wasn’t the idea.
Is that the reason you choose to produce your own albums? Keeping that under your control?
That’s how we were on the first record. Right from the beginning, we’ve
always wanted to do it ourselves, because I just don’t think we could
really communicate what we wanted with someone else. Not the way we can
with each other.
Lyrically, there are some political themes
running through this album, most obviously with “US Government.” Were
the political atmosphere and the actions of the United States
government at the time a driving force while you were writing this
record?
That song was written before any of that happened. It was
one of the first songs we ever wrote as a band. It was meant to be a
b-side on the first record, but we ended up taking it off because it
was around 9/11 and it seemed rather inappropriate because people had
lost friends around that time. We didn’t want to come out with a song
that was just like “Fuck it. Burn it all down.” It wasn’t the right
timing for that kind of message. So we waited on it, and we kind of
threw it away for a while, and it always felt like the song never had a
chance, never had its own time. So we put it on this record just to let
people hear it and see what they think. It’s good, because now things
have cooled down a bit, after the heat of the moment of war, and this
and that, and this regime, and this war, everything is kind of backing
off a bit. And I think that’s the best way for the song to get through
and have its own voice.
It seems a lot of the songs touch on the idea of overall corruption in society, as well.
Yeah, but I don’t know if I’d sum it up like that too fast. I
definitely know what you’re talking about, but it’s always hard to put
a stamp on an entire album, an entire body of work. I don’t think every
song is about that, and that’s a risk you take by defining something in
one way. There’s a tension in the record, and its kind of a feeling of
running out of time. I actually do hear that in every song, you know?
There’s something in the voice, and the kind of urgency directed in the
words, and even the music. It’s kind of the last chance: the last
chance that this can be heard and this might be understood and without
it we’re nothing. That’s the scariest thing about the record. It’s the
hardest thing, seeing it released, and put out for people to hear it
and judge it, because it’s pretty close to our heart. It’s pretty close
to this last fleeting optimism that we have. That’s the last vulnerable
stuff inside we have. It’s just this hope that there might be something
better out there, something more.
A few months back, Godspeed
You! Black Emperor, another band with that same kind of tension, played
Mississippi Nights. At the end of the show, they ran a visual of the
word “hope” scrawled against the back wall. During the encore, the band
spoke out against the war, using the stage as a way to present their
views. In your situation, do you feel comfortable actually speaking
about politics on stage, outside of songs?
I think that’s great
that they do that. For our band, it just feels like…I don’t know.
[Pause] The last thing we ever want to do is preach to people and force
anything down someone’s throat. The idea of the record was that if this
isn’t for you, then walk away. We didn’t make a very universal sound
and message in this record, and it doesn’t appeal to everyone. The last
album I kind of felt was more that way, where everyone could find
something in it. It was more questions, and something everyone could
kind of recognize. There’s something familiar in that. This album, it’s
different. Yet I don’t know if we’re ready to become that kind of band.
Speaking out for something…it’s hard to explain. Music is like our
weapon of choice. It is the way that we can communicate. Right now, I’m
saying a bunch of shit and I don’t even know what it sounds like. Right
now, I don’t even know how to explain things. But in music, there’s
some kind of harmony in it where all words and thoughts seem to come
together. I wouldn’t pick any other place besides that to really talk
to people, know what I mean?
In the last years, you’ve spent a
lot of time in Europe and played a number of huge festivals. Are you
looking forward to playing some smaller clubs again in the States?
We got to do a small tour a couple months ago of probably a dozen shows
in America that were really small rooms, and that was one of the most
fun things we’ve ever done, just because it’s been a while since we’ve
done that. We had all these new songs and they hadn’t ever got their
feet wet, and that’s the best way to introduce people to music. If you
have a new song that’s never been heard before, and introduce it to
people, you don’t want to do it at Madison Square Garden. [Laughs] It
needs to learn how to walk just as much as anybody; it needs to find
its ground and footing. That’s what was really special about that tour
for me, was all those songs kind of grew up on the road with us. And
then now we’re playing all these pretty big places in America. We
didn’t know what to expect coming back home…if anybody would give a
shit anymore or what.
How’s the reaction been so far?
It’s
trippin’ us out, you know? So far we’ve been lucky that the people
remember us from when we started touring a couple years ago, and more
are coming. It doesn’t feel that different anymore. It doesn’t feel
like we’re really just doing well overseas in Europe and Australia. It
feels like things are starting to balance and we’re being heard by
everyone. That’s a nice feeling.
It sounds like you guys have
been fairly prolific in writing on the road and at home. Can we look
forward to another new album anytime soon?
Yeah, we’ve had a pretty
cool idea of what we want to do for the next one for a while now. All
these songs that Peter and I have written have this back-porch feeling,
kind of acoustic. Just structurally back down to blues and country,
Americana…kind of a gospel feeling. Those kinds of songs. And very,
very fuckin’ different from anything we’ve done. We have these songs
we’ve written, and we just wanted to make a record just like that. The
one thing we didn’t do on this record is make a concept album. And
that’s the only way we can get away with it. It won’t fit if we try to
do what we do now and mix it together, because there’s just no in
between. We’re just going to do a record that’s really a
back-to-basics, down-home album. And probably alienate every single one
of our fans. [Laughs]
Or pick up a whole new group you didn’t expect.
[Laughs] Yeah, we’ll be playing at the Tic Toc Inn by the next one.
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