THE
Weathering the Changing Face of Rock Music
by Mike Mettler(Page 3)
TK: We had a lot of music at first without lyrics. I feel the music--I mean, I know what I'm feeling when I write it, I just can't say it.
UD: Is your music based mostly on emotions?
TK: I think it mutates after a point, after everyone gets involved with it. If it's just me on acoustic guitar, it's obviously going to be different once the vocals, bass, and drums are added to it. The basis of the song is still an emotional thing, though. That's where it starts.
UD: Alison, what's your approach when you're writing a song?
AJ: It's a slow process for me. I'm not that prolific. Initially, though, it all came in a rush to me; I probably wrote six songs in a week.
UD: You ever have a song come to you all in one shot?
AJ: Oh yeah. Quite a few actually. Or I'll come up with a line or two and mix it with another phrase that I've had in mind for a while... "Queen City" is a song like that. It started as an old tale of a cat and the cockroach written in the '20s, a comic-strip kind of thing, and I got to thinking about the cat, and then Cleopatra, and then it turned out to be a song about drugs on [Manhattan's] Lower East Side. There's junkie women there who are distorted queens of the city, so it went from one extreme to another.
MG: There was one day we were walking down the street and there was this young Spanish woman with a really passive husband, and she was beating the shit out of this little kid, saying, "Stop crying."
AJ: I've always been affected by the abuse of little children, and there she is, hitting this child in the face while the father is just holding the stroller so that the chair wouldn't move while she's punching her child. The kid was probably 3 or 4. And I made a beeline for this woman--I was overwhelmed, the adrenaline was pumping--and I went up to her and pointed a finger in her face and let her have it. I said to her, "Who do you think you are? This child is powerless!" She got really mad and tried to kick my ass. She had really long blood-red fingernails and was going to scratch my eyes out. Michael had to pull her off of me. I couldn't even talk to him for a whole block, I was so shaken. That kind of thing affects a lot of my songs. It also drove me out of the city [to live on Staten Island] and made me really bitter about wanting to save the world and wanting to have peace of mind.
UD: It's hard to have feelings in this city a lot of the time. I live in New Jersey because I feel like I can escape whatever's going on here in New York; I can isolate myself from it. But how many times a day do you get approached for money or handouts in the city and not even pay attention to it anymore? You feel so disconnected.
MG: It makes me feel bad because I wish I could help, give them some kind of monetary support, but I know in 90 percent of the cases they're just going to buy booze.
UD: Do you think that the New York environment has an effect on what comes though in your music?
MG: I think it does, at least indirectly. It would be dishonest of us to say we're "torn up" by the angst of New York City--it's not that. But the metropolitan thing seeps into your life whether you like it or not, and when you're playing--even when you're jamming--the emotions you carry around with you every day are driving how you write. It's inescapable. Lyrics reflect your mental palette for the day; they reflect where you live. If we lived in a coal-mining town, I guess we'd be writing about having black lung and drinking beer out of flat-top cans.
