Below is our unedited interview with Christopher
R. Weingarten (@1000timesyes) from the
Village Voice Sounds of the City. It had to be chopped up a bit because my responses were too ve
rbose (oops).
WEINGARTEN: What is "I'm History" about?
We liked toying with the notion that there's this phrase a bully in an old after school movie might say, "That's it nerd, you're history!", and it's an innocent enough phrase. But if you think about it for a second, there's this whole other heavy context. When we die, we really are history, only a part of the past...but we live on in the monuments we've left behind. It's also a bit tongue in cheek since in a way we're wiping our hands clean of the dance music that had grown old to us while we were in Paragraph, like "ok, that's it, outta here!"
The track "I'm History" is a bit of a two-parter, dealing with separate ideas of contradictory nature. The verses concern that notion that all the stuff that happens in our lives, all the things we strive for, won't fully make sense until we're gone and our story is complete. We never get to see the end result of our labors, and the longer we live, the closer we get to a legacy we'll never see or know fully. The chorus of "I'm History" refers to the cognitive dissonance that can result from trying to decide between a stable life and living a more hedonistic lifestyle.
WEINGARTEN: What inspired it musically?
We delved into a lot of Hüsker Dü and also the weird back catalog of Nirvana stuff...we were also really into the sludgy heaviness of The Melvins' Houdini, and the way the drums were heavy and powerful without having to be played fast. The song "I'm History" is basically a mash-up of the parts that gave us chills from several songs we love (These include Hüsker Dü - Don't Want to Know if You are Lonely, Nirvana - Downer, the way the vocals sustain over awesome chord changes in Hybrid Moments by Misfits, as well as a part in a song called Indiana Jones by some friends of ours in a band called Les Vinyl).
WEINGARTEN: What inspired it lyrically?
We were into double meanings and making a big deal about every day things like eating and getting annoyed at work which we tried to combine with what we perceived to be the plastic, disposable and almost anti-timeless nature of many forms of art these
days.
A lot of the lyrics were written on the spot in the studio, however, because we were under the gun to finish the album in one marathon night.
WEINGARTEN: Tell me all about the 10 hour session for the record...
I can't really get into the details, but we had made a promise to someone that we would start and finish tracking the record in one night if they promised they wouldn't cause harm to themselves. The album opener was written by Michael when he was 15 and one of the tracks is a cover by a now defunct NYC R&B/dance trio named Trick & The Heartstrings, but otherwise a lot of the tracks were unfinished and were written in the studio. We had a lot of coffee and did all the tracking live, but we hadn't even played our first live show yet so it was a nerve wracking process.
Luckily, we had been practicing most of the finished music for a couple of weeks beforehand and were blessed to have Patrick in the band nailing it on drums...everything you hear is either a first or second take with minor guitar overdubs on only two songs. Like I said, there was a lot of pressure on us to finish it so failure wasn't really an option anyway.
WEINGARTEN: Has Hunny played any shows yet?
We had finished tracking the album in March but are only just now releasing it, so in the interim we've had a couple dozen shows performing in a lot of weird spaces, but not many venues. Our first show was at one of the last loft parties at Newsonic in Brooklyn before they had to move out which was great, and we had a really awesome gig at Piano's. We've done some art galleries and a bunch of strange basement shows in places such as New Brunswick where there are lots of Christmas lights hanging up and you're playing in front of, like, a washing machine.
We've also had some local shows on Staten Island, but it was definitely strange to have finished an album before ever having set foot on stage together. We just welcomed a new gentleman into the band on additional guitar, so our live sound has gotten immensely more powerful...and we've only had one show with him so far! We're much more free to build a more powerful and more playful set; up until now we'd been tearing through the set from start to finish, but with our new guitarist we can really set a frame around each song and create a more meaningful context for them on stage.
We're also really excited to be playing more in Staten Island since there's been a lot of action going on in the scene. This print-only zine called "StapleLand" just started popping up around town and there's a new local record label forming that we're hoping to get on called Laptop Smashing Party, so it's definitely a really cool time to be involved.
WEINGARTEN: Tell me about getting burnt on dance-pop? Do you remember a straw that broke the camel's back?
There was no one moment, it was just a slow steady decline of fun and creativity. We stopped getting along and the shows lost that old spark they used to have...luckily we weren't an institution forced to embarrass itself like Metallica or something, and it was easier for us all to let go and start fresh. Michael and I in particular reacted very strongly to this freedom by striking out in a completely different direction from all that dance stuff. It's funny, since none of us particularly get along very well in this band either, but we've been playing with different people and in different projects which helps us deal.
There's a new experience level now that allows us not to feel so attached to just one thing, which in turn gives us the freedom to risk taking Hunny to new and exciting places. Michael just recently played saxophone on a track off an upcoming release by this great psych improv band called In Buenos Aires, and earlier this week I recorded bass on an upcoming track by John Nolan, of Taking Back Sunday and Straylight Run. Patrick plays drums in a jazzy semi-improv project called the Bananas, as well as in these two awesome bands Les Vinyl and Emerald Lakes (which gets kind of weird since a bunch of our ex-girlfriends are in Emerald Lakes). Unkl JoJo, the guitarist that just joined Hunny, is a bit older than us and actually used to guitar tech for that band the New Radicals after meeting them when they filmed their video at the Staten Island Mall, so his experience has been very helpful as well.
I guess the problem with Paragraph wasn't so much that we got sick of dance music but that it became this big thing we were attached to that got away from us, and we had no other outlet of expression. We put a lot of time and effort into this one thing for such a long time, that now it's been really freeing to try all kinds of new things, doors which wouldn't have been opened if we kept trying to push that cart against gravity.
WEINGARTEN: How did you discover Nirvana/Melvins records in the 90s? What did they mean to you? What was your favorite record in the 90s?
Oddly enough, my mother first exposed me to Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and Hole at a very early age, maybe 8 or 9. She would only listen to these CDs when we weren't in the car because I guess they were kind of inappropriate, but since we were always running late in the morning when she'd drive my sister and I to school the CD would already be playing at full blast and I'd get to hear snippets of In Utero that sounded like nothing I'd ever heard before. I didn't get to hear much more of In Utero because it probably didn't sound enough like Nevermind to her, but I knew Live Through This and Automatic for the People backwards and forwards. My rebellion against my parents music manifested itself in like, Smash Mouth records, so I was definitely misguided youth.
All the other dudes were lucky enough to have cooler older brothers that got them into that stuff for real, and Unkl JoJo was really into Loveless and Siamese Dream at the time. Group consensus among the younger guys in Hunny puts the Spice Girls eponymous CD as our favorite album while we were growing up in the 90's, so it should be clear that our re-fascination with the sound that inspired I'm History is more of a sleeping beast being awakened after years of neglect.
WEINGARTEN: What can you tell me about peaking your voice out in these songs?
It helps to make clear that Michael is a very soft spoken individual and it came as a big surprise to anyone that knew him that he was about to be screaming in a band, let alone singing in one. When I asked him about this, he told me singing has been the most liberating experience for him. He said he feels like he can accomplish anything now, and I've noted the marked difference in his personality.
The thing about Hunny is that at first glance the music doesn't seem as "pretty" in a lot of ways as the stuff that we were doing in Paragraph, however I think it comes from a more real and raw place for us. It's not all about screaming and peaking our voices out, and there's a certain tunefulness to the way Michael chooses to sing.
Listening to the album, you'll see we've book ended it with two very pretty tracks and I feel that these moments, among others, in concert with the more aggressive stuff help emphasize the dynamic change we're going for.
WEINGARTEN: Did you read the grunge book yet?! (I'm workin on it myself...)
I haven't Everybody Loves Our Town yet, but the last book I read that was similar was Please Kill Me, the oral history of punk. I was reading it while we were engaged in a southeast tour of the U.S. with Paragraph back in 2009.
On one of our off nights we found a venue that we hadn't been scheduled to play at that was totally packed out, and we approached it with our gear saying we were booked to play that night and that we'd been running late. It was probably too punk a move for Paragraph and didn't quite work out, but even then the roots of Hunny had taken hold.
