Last month, California’s Cold War Kids returned to the scene with their amazing new album, Loyalty to Loyalty – the follow-up to their 2006 critically acclaimed debut, Robbers & Cowards. Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with lead singer and pianist Nathan Willett.
Hi Nathan. Can you tell me a little bit about how the band formed?
Yeah, we’ve known each other for years and were just all fans of music… through different schools and different friends, we just got together. Beyond that, we really didn’t have a lot of intention of touring, or doing things on a major scale.
So it sounds as if you guys all gravitated together very naturally.
Yeah, definitely.
Reflecting a bit on your influences, if the four of you sat down in a room and started talking about music, what would some of the key threads be?
Um, probably Tom Waits and The Velvet Underground - they would be some of the big ones, and people like Nina Simone. But we’re just all over the place in terms of style.
Were you personally very engrossed with music from an early age?
Yeah, you know, my mom was in a lot of different folk groups, and we had a piano in our house. Growing up in Southern California, I had a lot of friends that were in punk and hardcore bands – just stuff that I really wasn’t interested in - so I didn’t really figure I had much of a place for playing, or meeting like-minded musicians around where I was. I didn’t actually end up playing with people all that much until I met these guys. I had recorded this tape of Elvis Costello covers that I done, and some of the guys heard it and wanted to do something.
And how did the name Cold War Kids come about? I always thought that was such a classic name.
It came from our bass player, Matt Maust. There was this park in Europe, near Budapest, that had fallen statues of Communist, cold war-era leaders, that kids would literally play on, and we liked that whole aesthetic.
That’s very interesting. So, the new album is called Loyalty to Loyalty. Can you explain what the title means?
Yeah, it’s a phrase coined by Josiah Royce, a writer from the early 1900’s. We started writing Loyalty to Loyalty as a reaction to (his writings) - kind of how man should not rise above one another, but instead be a support to each other, and a lot of the songs are sort of in-between these different philosophies.
Where did you record the album, and did it take awhile?
We recorded in a few different rooms in L.A., some of the bigger named studios in the area. But we’re a very frugal band in that we don’t want to allow ourselves too much time in the studio.
Because the approach is, “let’s knock this out on the first take because that’s the freshest and most organic,” or is it just about economics? Or, is it a mixture of both?
It’s a mixture of both. We do a few takes and then put it to rest… trying to be as live as possible.
So, you cut a lot of tracks live?
Oh, yeah, definitely.
And most of those takes made it to Loyalty to Loyalty?
Yeah.
You can definitely hear that on tracks like “Against Privacy,” which has a very open-room feel to it - it’s almost feels like your sitting in a concert hall while listening to that song. So, did you guys have set objectives going into the sessions for this album, or even when you were writing the record?
You know, we don’t necessarily know how to describe what it is that we do, so we try to not even be super-aware of what a record is going to be like, or how it is different from the last record. We try to be unaware while we know that, ultimately, we wanna go in and write more songs. I think it’s important for bands – or at least us, anyway – to approach it naturally.
But with that being said, now that the record is done, and you’ve completed this creative process, could you make any comparisons or contrasts between this record and your last album, Robbers & Cowards? The reason I ask is because while Robbers & Cowards is a great record that received a lot of critical acclaim, this record, Loyalty to Loyalty – to my ears, anyway – is really something special. Just from the opening notes of the record, you can tell…it’s like, “Oh, wow… we’re going somewhere here.”
Oh, definitely. I mean, our first record had a much slicker sound than this new album, which has a much darker sound to it. It’s interesting for me, because we think this record is much better than the first, but of course, going into that whole thing about a second record - people kind of read into it what they want to. I don’t know… I think we’re just kind of preparing ourselves for the fact that you never know what to expect from people’s thoughts. But we just kind of have to roll with it. All of this is very new for us, so….
New in the sense that it’s just not about the four of you guys anymore?
Yeah. New in the sense that we have never really been through this criticism game when people’s opinions - way outside of our existence - are very strong. And that’s kind of the reality with any entertainment. It’s new to us, but I guess that’s how it works.
Is this record a political record at all?
Yeah, I think there are political things going on there. The song “Welcome to the Occupation” is one that I think most strongly deals with the “loyalty to loyalty” theme, and it’s also the most autobiographical. I was a doing student teaching right before we started touring, and that song is about teaching as a public institution that is kind of owned by the state, and the feelings of an artist trying to break out of that situation. There are a lot of other capitalist and socialist themes going on the record, and a lot of other things relevant to a lot of the questions our country is asking itself right now.
Cold War Kids will play two very special shows in the area this month – first on October 15th at Webster Hall in NYC, and on October 16th at the Williamsburg Hall of Music in Brooklyn.
