Thin Red Line - Interview (page 2)
How do you as a band approach songwriting?
PJ: Usually Troy comes up with a riff, that was a lot of the early stuff
TN: Yeah, at the beginning it was just like "here's a riff" like that tune ("Too Hip" playing in background). I don't know later on - there was never any, you know "I'll teach you this part" or "I'll teach you that part", it was just kind of like a basic idea and it evolved in rehearsals. I remember one summer me and you (looks at John) got together, I think we worked on "I Don't Care" and we revamped it, so it was more like a collaborative thing.
PJ: John was actually good at putting together like entire, you know, project kind of things, and "OK here's the tape, let's work from there."
TN: (to Peter) When you wrote songs you actually had the written out, so that was like the easiest thing, 'cause you just read the music
PJ:I can't play any other instruments (laughs)
TN: So I guess it ranged from totally written out to just like "well I have a riff, and you make something up and we'll do it" Know what I mean?
DR: We really wrote 'em a whole bunch of different ways, which is funny. I mean even "Execution of The Plan", that was where we had ideas that would be half finished and mail them on cassette tape to each other and just finish 'em up for each other. So the music would be all done, and I would write the lyrics to this or, you know John would send over this riff to Troy and it would come back as a song
TN: Too, it was just like, on my part it was just like impatience. It was like "well, yeah, here's something, let's go" you know what I mean? (laughs) Count off the beat and go.
JM:I think the first year, I didn't feel that confident about what I was writing, 'cause I didn't think that anything I was doing was fitting in, and we try something and move onto something else. but I think the second year I started getting more confident, learning how to fit within the framework
DR:I think that came with learning to be a front man too, like, John became more of the front man the second year. At first we didn't even know like who was playing guitar, who was singing, you know? Real basic stuff. And as the roles, you know, got a little bit more defined, John got more authority and started writing more stuff.
MM: Did you guys wind up ever jamming and then see if anything came out of that?
DR: We would do that at practices, not all the time but definitely sometimes there would just be that hunk of noise. One great thing was that we would play together all the time...every Sunday, for, what, maybe three or four hours, it just seemed like a long time, just you know, set up and play. Play and play and play. Play everything you had, just play random stuff, and that's how you get better as a band, just playing together.
PJ: We had a lot of lyrics already written out, too, so if you come up with a tune, man, I can fit the lyrics to it.
JM:I would just keep a notebook, and every night before I want to sleep I would just pull it out and see if I could write something
PJ: Works surprisingly well for a lot of cases
TN: Yeah, John and Dave I think were the lyricists, 'cause like, I just had a hard time with lyrics, so I might have a chord progression and they would just write the lyrics to it, and that worked out pretty well.
