The Academy Is…
We manage to grab co-founder and guitarist, Mike Carden, and lock him on a tour bus for a little chat.
It's been non-stop since their arrival in the UK, and they're running behind on soundchecks at their Leeds gig. Still, as sympathetic as we are, we manage to grab co-founder and guitarist, Mike Carden, and lock him on a tour bus for a little chat.
Ok, first of all, this has been bugging us for about 18 months now, the academy is what exactly?
Well, what happened was the band's name was "The Academy", and then we had some legal issues because it's a really common name and we didn't really know any better. We threw the "is..." on just for legal/no reason. We just wanted to keep "The Academy" and we had a bunch of merch - this was like four years ago, so we did that.
You're on a UK tour at the moment; what’s your favourite thing about touring?
Just playing. It's been a while since we've played last so we've been enjoying the playing. The hour on stage is by far the best part. It's just good to be out on tour, it's been six months so just all the things that goes into touring as far as just the social aspect of it. It's nice to be back into it because we were a bit worn down after the last tour, after doing Warped tour, then we went in to make a record, and now it's like going back. It feels like when you get that excitement the day before school or something; you've got all your stuff ready and you're like, "I'm ready to go!" I'm excited so it's very much like that.
Have you been having fun so far?
So much fun, yeah, it's been great. It's this country, it gets me, you know! It's just fun, fun, fun! It's so funny because in America when you go to a club they don't play any rock music, it's just all dance crap. Which is fine, I can get into it. But here it's just so funny because there's people dancing to Blur and stuff. I'm just like, "I can't even believe this," so I get excited. But yeah, I've been having a good time. We share a bus with The Audition; it's fun, they're good guys.
It's a good job you like them then, considering...
Oh, absolutely, yeah. I've known them forever, we grew up like two cities across.
What's been your worst live experience?
Earlier in the band we would do awkward gigs where we were supporting a weird band and maybe the crowd reception wasn't that good. But now we laugh about all of them so I'm trying to think if there's one that in particular...Just playing a school or a college very early on, where everyone's like, "Who's this guy?" But it's all part of the fun of playing ridiculous stuff. Sometimes TV because, for the most part, our band was rooted on live performances so we never really got into there being video cameras and being supposed to act like there was a crowd. That stuff makes it kind of weird at times. But I think that's something we're learning. With stuff like that, we try to take it with a grain of salt and not to get too serious about it because you can't get too down on it. It's going to be a bit awkward. It feels way more natural to play to a big group of a thousand people than to four cameramen, which is weird.
Some of your lyrics, particularly for 'Black Mamba' are quite nasty to us music journalists; do you hate us all?
Oh no, no, not at all. We made an EP before 'Almost Here',and I think we were a little bit salty just because people judged it, within that record, so hard. It was just like a Chicago little thing but I think we took it a little more to heart, too much to our heads. I think now with the press, we have a little more fun with it and we don't worry too much about anything because at the end of the day, not be this guy, but the tour's doing well and people want to come and see our band and that's all that really matters.
How do you feel now after all the attention you received last year?
I was a bit surprised that 'Almost Here' did what it did. I wasn't really expecting that at all. I don't think that me and William, when we wrote the record, were kind of expecting that we were gonna tour and come to the UK three times on it, tour the states non-stop, and it was great. I think it was natural in a sense because we toured and toured and toured and now we have a loyal fanbase, if you wanna call it that, and it was done in, I would say, a very natural way. It was obviously not the slowest process but it wasn't overnight either. So I feel really proud that we worked it to the best of what we could, the best way.
How do you go about writing new material?
On this record, 'Santi', we kind of had a bunch of demos. We used this program called Garageband, which is like a simple recording thing, and we recorded on tour, very much like we're sitting now actually. We'd put the laptop down and a little mic, and would record little ideas, maybe a guitar line, a vocal line. Just little burps of music. And when we went home we would have like thirty or forty of those little burps that could be anywhere from fifteen seconds to six minutes of messing around, or doodling, kind of. And we all sat in the practice basement and said, "Oh, that's a cool idea, I remember when we did that." Some of them were a year, two years old, so this was over time. It's kind of like looking at a messy closet and thinking, "oh yeah, I remember this shirt, and I remember this", you start finding stuff and picking it apart.
So tell us about the new album, what does 'Santi' mean?
It's funny because it's kind of an inside joke for The Academy Is.... We started saying it a lot on tour for whatever reason with the other bands. There's a back story to it; Sisky and Bill went to school with a guy named Santi and he wasn't a very nice guy, it was kind of out of spite. You know you have those inside jokes that don't really make sense but they do? Words that are just really funny. And then when we were making the record, we were so in our own little world, that we thought that would make sense. I don't think we thought that we were gonna have to explain it. When you name a record, you kinda want to name something that means a lot to the five people involved. And everything that we were coming up with didn't really encompass the record, and there wasn't really a lyric that we felt like was going to encompass the record. And 'Santi', for us, means what the record means.
Well, why not? How did writing and recording the Santi differ from 'Almost Here'?
We were better players so we grew. Different influences. This was more of a proper record as far as a producer that we much trusted and appreciated; a seasoned engineer that helps with sounds, that keeps the sonic value on the up. And I think the way we went in to record this when we were very much into the feelings and the emotions of it, rather than really looking at it too technical. I think, when I was younger, as a songwriter and a guitar player, I would over-analyse things, whereas on this record, what it is, is so it made it more enjoyable rather than over-thinking and over-analysisng everything.
So how do you feel about it?
Great. Absolutely, I love it. The whole band loves it. We recorded it quickly, it was about twenty two days, it was maybe a tad faster than 'Almost Here', which really set the tone of the record. The first song, we went in and we kicked it down in three or four hours, and after that we kept going.
What do you expect from it?
Just what we've been doing. I dunno. I don't really think in terms of awards or how many albums. I think that, right now, this is the most important thing to do, for us. We go make a record and then we go back out on tour, as opposed to waiting for the radio scans to come back or something. I don't think we're really much about that. So we're happy how we're doing it right now. I think we have enough good people around us, as far as people go, that visually do the band and videos, and we just try to have fun with that. We kind of reached this point where a lot of our friends got over serious and really started analysing their whole thing, and we really found out that that is no way to live, so we're just really trying to have more fun with everything. We take the music very seriously, but as far as everything else goes; people and the stuff we do online, even our videos, or the 'Big Mess' video, there's that element.
That video confused us.
Haha, I hear you. we just wanted to have fun and put our friends in it. We talked about having Billy calling Pete, and it was just the perfect line for him to say. So we thought it would be funny just to put all our friends in it and make it really crazy. I've known Pete and all those guys since I was like fifteen so we've been through a lot. We used to play old times together. I know how it looks on the outside when sometimes people don't know the back-story but we played shows when I was started to play guitar, and I knew Patrick and stuff so it's been fun. And there's a few other bands that we've toured with where it's been the same. We're lucky because we got to see them while they were growing, and most people just figure they came out of nowhere. Like Gym Class Heroes, for that matter, now all my friends that maybe don't know too much about the music biz are like, "Have you heard this band?"
"I told you, bro, we toured with them for like three months last year."
"No... that was that band?"
"Yeah, it was."
You've got to have fun with it because with the general public it can take a second to just click together. And if it does, I'm happy for them. I'm happier for Gym Class Heroes because I think they deserve it. We totally congratulate them with all their successes.
Do you think that your expectations of how people receive and perceive you and your music has changed after the success of the last album?
Possibly, I think people are quicker to judge us just because when you have a bit of success in any field in life, it's not your attitude, it's the way people approach you. People expect us to be a certain way, when we're not. Me and William talk about it all the time, people come up to us and imagine that because we're selling out a show, we'll act a certain way. We're just doing the same thing as everyone else does. Obviously we take our music seriously, and when we write we're very passionate about it, but we watch sports and do all the normal things. If not more, we have the same family and relationship stuff, if not more because we're away a lot and figuring stuff out on the phone isn't always easy. Like, for example, my brother is in his first year of university and just talking to him, which most people wouldn't expect me to do, like they wouldn't expect me to me concerned with that. My mum's like, "you should give your brother a call, see how he's doing because he's really stressed." We're just people. With the internet we try to make it very clear, when you look at our promo pic, you come to the show and then you go on the website, and hopefully everything starts to make sense to you about the band. Because I know how easy it is to perceive something from just a package deal or a poster and just assume that they are who they are. I think that goes across most bands. When I've met some of my heroes, they've either been really cool or really messed up, and that's fine too, it's all part of the fun.
What is your favourite thing about the UK?
A lot of the music I grew up on, or even recently, from The Clash to Blur and Oasis, there's just so many bands that I love. I think Kasabian's record, I like the new Bloc Party, I like The Kooks. I like a lot of stuff out of here that doesn't really make it to the states so hard. So I'm happy to be here and experience some things here that influence my music and our culture so much too. It's nice to be in the presence of it all. And it's funny now because we try to only listen to bands from the places whose presence we're in on the i-pod.
What has touring the UK been like, third time around?
The thing with this tour is it's kind of in between records. I really wanted to come over here before 'Santi' was released. This is kind of weird tour because 'Almost Here's over so it's a kind of like a promotional tour and we're doing a lot of press just to get the word out about it. We were just gonna come over for two days and do a London show but the promoters were like, " a lot of people wanna come see you." But we were a bit...we haven't been here for a year so we didn't want to book a whole tour because you never know, right? But then the tickets started selling and we got so happy, we added a Leeds show, we started adding all these shows, and Oxford last night was great. The fact that after a year, and 'Almost Here's kind of not on the back burner but it's not the thing everyone's talking about, at least for us that's what it feels like. As far as the fans then, their enthusiasm has been great! And at these shows, we get to meet a lot of them because on a scale of seven hundred people it's a lot easier to do autographs and everything else, so that makes it kind of enjoyable. When we did Warped Tour, it was kind of a big festival tour so it made it almost dangerous to, it becomes a health hazard. And the Honda Civic Tour we're doing with Fall Out Boy's like huge arenas and big places in America so this is perfect to kind of go do that.
There's nothing better than a little club, and bad little sound, and a sweaty room, and you're going for it.
How do the good old British fans compare to your American fans, then?
They're great and they're funny. Here, what I like about a lot of people here is that you can talk with them, and they'll admire you, but you can shoot the shit with them. They'll give it to you and people have attitudes, which is great because it's like these younger people. In the States it's very much more you're here, you sign, you do the hug, "bye". Whereas here, it's like, "oh, what'd you do today?" and then we get into it. It's just fun.
Who / what do you think will be 'big' in 2007?
I dunno... there's so many surprises always. I remember when people played me Panic! At The Disco I thought it was great but I just never knew it would go so big so fast. So there's always little good band surprises.
What are you listening to at the moment?
New Bloc party, I like that a lot. I still like Editors, I like their record a lot too. I just got the new Razorlight, which is fine; for me, it's a little soft but I do like it, and I like some of the lyrics in it.
And, lastly, why should people buy your music?
I dunno, I dunno even if you buy music anymore, right? The Academy Is... has been spread very word of mouth, I think. Whether that be the internet or people going to shows and telling their friends, so as long as that keeps going on we almost don't need to do the work so I don't get hung up. if people come to the shows, they obviously like the band enough to come in and buy the tickets, and they'll probably go and say, "wow, the show was great!" And more people will know about the band that way. So just, 'Santi' coming out April 2nd and myspace.com/theacademyis and theacademyis.com.
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