Cold War Kids: Rolling with Royce
By Team JamBase Sep 23, 2008 • 5:33 pm PDT
By: Jim Welte
 |
They hit the road hard, touring relentlessly and making themselves a fixture on the festival circuit in the U.S. and Europe. When you’d see them offstage at these festivals, the four members – singer Nathan Willett, bassist Matt Maust, guitarist Jonnie Russell and drummer Matt Aveiro – would always be together, catching other bands, tossing back a cold one, soaking it all in. Seemingly inseparable. Loyal to the core.
But this tale has been told countless times before: friends form a band, the band blows up, fissures develop over time and the band either breaks up or friendships morph into business partnerships. Willett says that’s not going to happen to his band.
 |
That strong bond isn’t Willett’s only reassurance. His confidence also lies in the words of American philosopher Josiah Royce. At the onset of the 20th century, Royce, who taught at Harvard and Berkeley, was one of the few voices interested in challenging the view of rugged, heroic individualism touted by the likes of Nietzsche, Walt Whitman and William James. Royce was an unapologetic idealist, arguing that true heroism was to work for the betterment of the community.
“A cause is good, not only for me, but for mankind, in so far as it is essentially a loyalty to loyalty, that is, an aid and a furtherance of loyalty in my fellows,” Royce wrote in the 1908 tome, The Philosophy of Loyalty.
Willett’s discovery of Royce provided both the defining M.O. of his band and an overarching theme of much of the music on its superb new album, aptly titled Loyalty to Loyalty, in stores September 23.
 |
“It has a lot of meanings,” Willett says of the album’s title. “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.”
Cold War Kids have balanced that need in one of the places where pride can poison loyalty: the recording studio. Willett writes all the lyrics, but the band approached each piece of music with the same philosophy.
“If you are really feeling something, keep playing and move forward with it and work with it, and if you’re really not feeling it but you know the other person is, allow them to carry it out,” Willett says. “Try to read each other. If there’s nothing going on, don’t fake it, but if someone is really into what they are working on, let them lead and go with it.”
Democracy rules, but so does the desire for as live a sound as possible. The band strives for one-take recordings, and each member pushes his parts as far as they can. As a result, the songs seem custom-built for live incineration, and the Cold War Kids rarely play a song the same way twice. Each member seems in full flight throughout their concerts, punishing his instrument but sticking like glue to his mates.
Continue reading for more on Cold War Kids…
 |
|
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.
 |
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.
 |
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”
Cold War Kids are on tour now, dates available here.
JamBase | Across The Spectrum
Go See Live Music!
