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It has a meaning about interpersonal dynamics with us. It has a meaning about relationships. A lot of the songs themselves are about the desire to be a strong individual and the need to serve the group and the struggles that come with that. -Nathan Willett on the Loyalty to Loyalty album title |
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The Kids got a taste for democracy of the political variety last month when they were invited to play at the progressive activist group MoveOn.org's event in conjunction with the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Willett repeatedly uses the word "interesting" to describe the experience, clearly not wanting his healthy skepticism of the event to seem like cynicism.
 Cold War Kids |
Willett says the band supports Obama, but didn't join the sort of unabashed fist pumping that tends to dominate those sorts of "preaching to the choir" events. "It was really interesting to watch and to see how much entertainment people really know about issues versus how much this was really just a really fun event with a whole bunch of bands and you have a backstage pass," remarks Willett.
Willett says the Cold War Kids support Obama because he has shown an ability to think beyond his party's historical ideology on certain issues, specifically his open mind on school choice and charter schools.
"You should always be skeptical of any world leader," he says, "but I could see where a Democrat would say, 'Yes, be skeptical, fine, but we NEED to win this time. We cannot afford to lose.' I understand that."
It is that level of thoughtfulness that was missing from much of the controversy that the Cold War Kids faced in the past year over its use of religious imagery and the revelation that Maust, Russell, and Willett met at Biola University, a private Evangelical school near Los Angeles. In a 2006 review of Robbers, Pitchfork parsed Willett's lyrics for religious metaphors and slammed the band for hiding religious motivations. Such a theory doesn't give Willett and his mates much credit as artists or as people. Plenty of rock bands wear their faith on their sleeve, but some of the greatest songwriters ever have used religious imagery as a way to tell stories through the characters that inhabit them. Willett says that's all he's doing.
 Cold War Kids |
"The people that we admire the most are the Leonard Cohens and the Bob Dylans and the Nina Simones, who all use so much of that imagery," Willett says. "All of us were raised in various religious backgrounds. For me, being raised in a Christian background, it is a constant source of themes that I have wanted to play with a bit."
If Willett's religious themes were actually autobiographical instead of allegorical, he and his bandmates would already have a lifetime's worth of stories to tell. Robbers told the tales of rapists, drunks, men who steal money from church collection plates, criminals on the lam and seniors waiting to meet their maker, while Loyalty tells of a suicidal woman ("Golden Gate Jumpers"), a girl obsessed with her violent, tattooed boyfriend ("Every Man I Fall For") and cutthroat upward mobility ("Welcome to the Occupation"). Willett says that using these themes doesn't qualify as an endorsement of any of them - including religion - and the assumption that it does is just lazy. He cites Pitchfork's claim that that the line, "put out the fire on us" from "Hospital Beds," would "signify a call for baptism."
"Who could be reading this and taking it seriously," he says. "And who listens to The Doors and hears 'Light My Fire' and reads [that] into it?"
But parsing lyrics and ignoring the possibility of non-literal translations is only half the problem. It also revealed an "alarming" distaste for religion in rock, a stance based on the assumption that "having some sort of spiritual bent to your lyrics is subversive."
"In many ways, music-wise, people are drawing from more cultures and influences than ever and are more tolerant than ever, but at the same time you are always the most conscious about things that are the most close to home. For a lot of people in this country, Christianity is the most close to home," Willett says. "For that reason, people are the most insecure and angry about it. That makes sense, but it was just weird that all of that came out with us, [people] who are not that interested in defending Christianity or defending a religion or any kind of ideology at all."
With the exception of loyalty, of course.
Cold War Kids - "Something Is Not Right With Me"
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