The Draft - Wiesbaden, 25.10.2006

Während ich Hot Water Music immer zwar „ganz nett“, aber dann doch eher langweilig fand, hatte das Debutalbum von The Draft feat. Jason Black, Chris Wollard und George Rebelo bei mir einen bleibenden Eindruck hinterlassen. Da die Jungs am 25. Oktober zu Gast in der hessischen Landeshauptstadt verweilten bot sich dies zu einem Interview an. Dies führte ich mit einem sehr gesprächigen Chris Wollard (Sänger und Songwriter) gemütlich im Biergarten vorm hiesigen Schlachthof.

To someone who hasn’t heard of The Draft yet, how would you describe your music?

Chris Wollard: I would definitely say Rock’n’Roll and that’s probably not the most accurate way to explain it to most people. But at the same time, you know, all these genres and categories is just like whatever man. We have two guitars, bass and drums, that’s a Rock’n’Roll-Band. That’s what it is

I read a lot of reviews of the CD and Interviews and almost everyone said The Draft sounds exactly as Hot Water Music. I have to admit, I’m Sorry, but I didn’t like Hot Water that much, but I really like In a million pieces. So what do you think is the difference?

Chris Wollard: I definitely had to, I wouldn’t really say change the way I write the songs, but we examine the way I write songs. With Hot Water it was all four of us wrote music, at different points all four of us wrote vocals and lyrics, definitely we had two singers, we definitely had two guitar players, so someone wrote a big part and someone else would adapt to that and you’d work on it altogether. And you had two singers, so you had two different ideas of what the melody was doing, that created a lot of tension in the music. That’s what it was kind of like all about. With this band I’m writing all the vocals. In order to do that, its made me to sit down and write a song from start to finish, have a really good idea where the direction is going. In Hot Water especially in the earlier records we had been playing crazy stuff, sometimes it was just too weird. But with this one my position in the band has changed, so I really had to think about that a lot. I’ve always been in a lot other bands, so I was already kind of in the mood of writing a lot. And now there’s a lead guitar player and that’s not gonna be me, you know I’m not gonna be the rhythm and the bottom of the song, so I can really focus on. The more we worked and worked and worked it really just became all about the melody and the whole song and not just this little part

So there is a lot of more thought in it?

Chris Wollard: Yeah, but it’s a different kind of thought, like it has been a real challenge, it’s been a blast, because now I can walk in and have the whole idea of the song, the band is into it and supersupportive and it’s awesome, it’s fucking killer. And now I get to just work on whole songs, it’s superfun you know.

If I compare it I would say it is more powerful

Chris Wollard: That’s probably really relative to the listener I’d imagine. I think it’s very powerful cause I had to put a lot of work in it, so when I hear it I had a year of working into it and I feel really good about it. It feels powerful to me, I’m sure to some people Hot Water was more of the yelling and less the singing, so that might be more powerful to people. But that’s only if you compare the two, I never do that. To me this is just like a new band and I think about songwriting and I’m lucky enough to being able to do that

Would you say it’s really everything new? I mean, would you say that it is as difficult for you as for other new bands or would you say you have advantages from Hot Water Music, like fanbase or contacts and things like that?

Chris Wollard: Yeah. I think we have been playing for a year and a half now. At the beginning I felt there would be a lot of disadvantages and advantages, because its harder to make a totally new band, because you’ll always be compared. But you’re superlucky to have everyone already waiting to hear it, that’s a superbig advantage, when there’s already people who know that you’re doing this band and we were lucky enough to get back on Epitaph, which is a great label. So that’s a superbig advantage. We were a bit scared that people would compare it to much and not give us a chance to be a new band and expect us to do the same thing. It turned out that everyone just has been very supportive. We’re definitely not as big as Hot Water was, but it seems that people are checking it out and are having a good time. All the shows have been superfun, and we had no show when people where like „Whatever! Hot Water! Fuck off“. They have been very supportive. We have done 5 or 6 tours now and it’s starting to feel that people are accepting us as a new band. It’s awesome! Superlucky!

Does it annoy you if people compare you with Hot Water Music?

Chris Wollard: Me personally not. It doesn’t bother me at all, because since Hot Water started I was in Rumbleseat, Cro(w)s, Blacktop Cadence, and everything I’ve ever done has been compared to Hot Water . I’m kind of used to it. It doesn’t really bother me. You know I’m really happy about Hot Water Music, there is no bad feelings. I spent almost 12 years of my life, having the best years of my life. I have no bad feelings about this, so it doesn’t bother me at all. It makes sense, if you’re writing a zine it’s the most obvious thing to talk about. I’m glad that people are willing to talk about it, cause it doesn’t always work like that

Do you know the german band Beatsteaks?

Chris Wollard: Yeah

Some songs reminded me of the early Beatsteaks. Would you agree on that?

Chris Wollard: Sure, why not? Me, Jason and George are huge Beatsteaks-Fans

So it’s a compliment rather than an insult or something?

Chris Wollard: Yeah, it would be an absolut compliment. I don’t know if they directly influenced us, but we all listen to their records, all three of the records that we have pretty often, we think they are killer. We know those guys, we met them in the States on Warped Tour, we’ve seen them in Berlin when we were early here. Killer guys, and they write awesome music. Yeah, if you think that it’s cool

Which bands would you say influenced you most?

Chris Wollard: We all listen to tons of weird shit. I don’t know it’s always changing. What I listened to when I was 19 is not completely different from what I’m listening to now. Lateley I’ve been listening to Calexico and Guided by voices. Also I listen to a lot of Rock’n’Roll CCR, old Blues, Muddy Waters, I listen to Blues a lot, Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, Black Flag. European Bands, like I said, Beatsteaks, we’re into Muff Potter, we’re into Dover from Spain, they are fucking incredible, Leatherface from England, that’s one of my favourite bands absolutely. We listen to a lot of Reggae, lately I’ve been listening to Cubana music, pretty much everything that grabs our attention. Whatever we can find, that’s good and honest.

I was wondering about the artwork. Could you explain that to me? Or is it just art?

Chris Wollard: Well, this guy has done a lot of art for us lately. His name is Christian Norris and he is from Florida. He is totally awesome. He has done a lot of stuff for other bands lately like Against Me!, so we really wanted to use his art cause he is crazy with his colour, he is so outrageous and he is really supercool and that is why we decided to work with him. He has done a lot of art for us already, like a lot of different T-Shirts. So we were going crazy one night. The more we kept talking about it, the more we came out with that shit. For some reason, I don’t know why, in some lyrics I was writing there was this very kind of lost feeling, everything was fucking up, but you kept working and kept going and that’s why I have been reading for the last year a lot of these sea-books, adventure stories at sea, and so it kind of snugged it some other vibe that I was trying to myself at some of the songs, but really the art that was kind of the vibe we felt and the more that we talked with Chris Norris, the guy who painted this, the more we talked with him about it, the more he just really made it. An there was some songs, I give all the lyrics to him, we wrote over twenty songs for this record and there is only twelve on it, so there is a lot of songs that didn’t make it on here, this broken glass tidal wave that was kind of in one of the songs, we had a song that was called Chewing on broken glass, he just pulled out a lot of there things. We talked about everything in the lyrics. There is a friend of me, and I’m sure she got it from somebody else, I’m sure she read about it somewhere, she told me not to write about the moonlight, but to write about how it reflects on the glass that’s broken in the gutter. I don’t know if Chris Norris read that. When he started doing the first sketches and showing us this that was the first thing that popped into my mind. I love it for that. It’s probably the closest we worked with anybody. With Hot Water we did the same thing, we always try to have the artist doing obvisual representation of what we are trying to create. This is sometimes ridiculous, cause we are writing everything down, but it’s fun. And working with him is just a blast, it was a supercool process. I’d love to hear what he has to say about it. I still haven’t asked him where he got that from.

What makes you happier? Working on the songs and having the product or presenting it to your fans on stage?

Chris Wollard: Working on it! That’s definitely my favourite thing. Like I said earlier: I had to make a turn in this band. In Hot Water that was my favourite thing: Practicing, we practiced five days a week in a warehouse, Monday to Friday, so that’s all you think about. That’s a real cool thing not many people get to experience, four people, or when you are in the studio it’s maybe five or six people and if you bring in more instruments it’s even more people, clearly concentrating on one thing, it’s a really cool process. And when you start with the simple idea of acoustic guitar, you start figuring out the vibe in which it should be and you start playing around with it, then all of a sudden you got bass and drums and the guitar around you, then layering on the backup vocals, you get a little bit more time playing it and then you say „lets bring a little bit piano in“ and then you can’t wait to get into the studio to hear what it sounds like… The energy is just so wild I think some of the other guys prefer touring. When you’re playing there is this immediate urgent vibe and that’s really cool and that’s definitely part of it. To me it’s like getting the ideas together

What’s your personal favourite song on the CD?

Chris Wollard: They are all different. Some of them I really like the lyrics. My favourite music is probably Alive or dead, it’s not the most complicated song or anything. It happened really quick. I was actually on vacation and it was my 30th birthday, I was in my hotel room with my fiancée the next morning and my guitar and it just came out of the blue and I just started recording it immediately. It changed a lot, but it happened out of nowhere. Every time I play it, I’m like „Fuck“, so I like that one a lot I like All we can count on, The Tide is out is maybe the most serious song on the record Lozee Rose I like a lot because the band wrote the music. The other three guys wrote it. It was funny, on this vacation, while I was gone and wrote Alive or Dead and they wrote Lozee Rose and we got back together and I was like „Check out what I did“ and they „Check out what we did“, so that was really cool. There is a story to all of them. We wrote so much shit for this fucking record and every song we loved, but you know we were just forming a new band. We wrote some crazy powerblues and straightforward punkrock stuff, lots of just different shit, that was just because we were just experimenting with the music and it was a new band so we just played everything we wanted. We just write it and if it sucks it will probably not make it on the record, but if you can give yourself five days a week, always playing, it allows you whatever you want because you have time. There is no deadline, you can pick the time you need to do it. You can just let it happen

So what will happen to the other songs? Any plans for them?

Chris Wollard: There is two demosongs on a 7“ that is inside the Vinyl, just a free 7“, so there is two. I think we are gonna make another 7“ in a couple of months. Some of them never got recorded to a point where you want to release it, they are really shitty homedemos, so I’m sure not all of them will be released. But we will try to find a way to release as much as we can. Some bands like to release everything on one record. We don’t really like having superlong records

Thanks a lot! Hope you have fun on your tour

Chris Wollard: Right on. We are having a blast!

Seit der Show mag ich das Album sogar noch mehr als vorher…

The Draft auf Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/thedraft
Bandhomepage: http://www.thedraftband.com/

von Manuela Schon | 03.11.2006 | Kommentare (0) | Kommentar schreiben