Some musicians spend their down time hanging out at clubs, attending major sporting events or dating other celebrities. Graham Wright isn't one of them - he's content sitting in his Toronto apartment enjoying a bowl of blue corn tortilla chips and guacamole.
Welcome to the simple life of a member of Tokyo Police Club.
Tokyo Police Club - vocalist/keyboardist Wright, guitarist/percussionist Josh Hook, drummer/percussionist Greg Alsop and lead vocalist/bassist Dave Monks - plays the Madison Theater this week. The show is the latest stop of the group's current U.S. tour in support of Elephant Shell, its critically-acclaimed debut. Wright talked to us about his band's music, influences and the woes of never being able to find clean socks on tour.
Elephant Shell is 31 minutes long. What's up with the short songs? Do you guys record an album in a day and then bounce out on tour for a couple months?
It's certainly not that we can record an album in a day; I wish it was that easy. We spend as much time as anyone else, coming up with shorter songs. A lot of people do ask us about it, and we've never had a satisfactory answer because there is no method to it. We're not timing the songs when we write them, so we just write them and when they feel right, we stop. If you asked us to guess after we finish recording a song, we'd probably say, "Oh, this one's three minutes; no worries" - and sure enough, we time it, and it just breaks two (minutes).
Elephant Shell has been out for nearly a year. Thinking about the album now, what are your thoughts on it musically and just how it reflects the band?
I love it. I'm really happy with how it turned out, but the fact it did turn out well is something of a miracle because the process that we went through writing it was super-backwards and convoluted and circuitous. We've been talking a lot because we're working on new songs now, and every time we talk about how we want to write or want to record, we always start the sentence with 'You know, Elephant Shell was great, but we should do it the exactly the opposite of how we did it when we were making that record,' because we did it in such a messy way. But it worked. We came out with a record we really liked, fortunately. It's just kind of a miracle that it happened.
You sing on a few tracks, but you are probably better known as the group's keyboardist. Do keyboard players get enough love in rock bands?
Well, it's hard to say because it's very easy to play really bad and annoying keyboards. Especially in rock music, it would be really easy to get really epic and Pink Floyd and synth-y about it, which is something that I'm continuously trying to avoid. I think it's cool. It's a different texture people don't expect when they're listening to poppy rock music, and I do enjoy inserting that little element of weirdness just to mess the song up a little bit. But you have to be careful to tread the line between a really cool keyboard part and a really stupid keyboard part.
I think it probably is under-appreciated, but the fact it is under-appreciated maybe helps me be a little more appreciated. People look at the band and they see the drummer and the singer and the guitars doing something cool, and that's kind of old news in way. Lots of drummers are awesome; so are lots of guitarists - our drummer and guitarist are especially cool! - but then they look over to the other side of the of the stage and there's some weird kid playing the keyboards, and they're like, "Ahhh - I haven't seen a kid play the keyboard in a rock band before," so then they take extra notice of me and feel bad, so they appreciate me more. It's all a big trick.
You've been compared to The Strokes, among other bands - is it more annoying or complimentary to get compared to other bands?
To me, it's really neither. It is a compliment at the end of the day, obviously. To be compared to a a band you like is never a bad thing. But people have to write something to describe your band. I feel sorry for the journalists who only have 100 words to describe what your music sounds like and the easiest way to do that is to name three bands that you sound like a mix of. It's kind of lazy in a way, but it's also the only way you can pull it off.
Obviously, we're big Strokes fans. They were a huge influence on us in the beginning. I personally don't hear a lot of Strokes influence in our music, but that's not for lack of trying sometimes.
What about everyone talking about the quote-unquote "big words" David likes to use?
I guess he uses bigger words than some people do. I think it's funny you get pegged with the label of "literate rock" or "library-book music" if you use a couple of words that are more than two syllables. I write songs and find myself doing the same thing. It's not a gimmick. You don't sit down with a thesaurus and re-write your lyrics so they're filled with all the 26-point words. It just happens. We're kind of bookish, nerdy guys anyway, so that's just the stuff on the tip of our tongues. We're not putting any effort in looking up new words. We don't have a word-of-the-day calendar we're mining to find the next crazy word to put in our song.
Something like "Tessellate" gets a lot of attention because it's the title of a song. I did know what it means, but you hear a word like that, but it has a certain rhythm to it and you want to include it in a song. Not because it's a "big word" and people won't understand it - you just like the way it sounds and want to fit it in somewhere.
A lot of movies play up the moment a band hears their song on the radio for the first time. Did you guys ever have that moment with your music?
No, we didn't. And I always see those, and it makes me laugh because they always looked so shocked, like they had no idea it was going to happen - the radio station just found their song, came along and played it - and in real life it's not nearly that interesting or romantic. When a radio station plays your song, it's the result of you begging them to play your song, and then they tell you they're going to play your song on this certain show at this certain time.
I remember the first time our song got played on the radio. We all sat in the car together and listened to it, but we knew it was going to happen. We knew it was scheduled then, so we were all able to get together and listen. It's still a crazy trip when you hear yourself on (the radio) for the first time, but not as (much as it is in the movies), and probably not - for a lot of bands - with that level of unpredictability. (It's not like) you're just about to give up, and oh my god, they're playing our song on the radio! Everything is good again! It's not like that.
Is there an album you would say had a major influence on you guys before you became a band yourselves?
Absolutely - it was Kid A by Radiohead. I always tell people the direction my life has taken since I was 13 years old can be traced by to the first four notes of that record. At the time, I was in eighth grade, I was young, I listening to whatever was on the radio (or) whatever. I liked music, but I wasn't passionate about anything; I just listened to what I listened to. And then my friend, my lucky friend who had an older sibling to introduce him to good music - I did not, I'm the oldest sibling - dragged me to the mall when Kid A came out and said, "You've got to get this record." I had heard them before, I had no real thoughts about them one way or the other, and then I put that record on ...
It's funny - for a lot of people, that's a really obtuse and difficult record that alienated a lot of people, but with me, it really just connected with me and made me suddenly realize how wonderful music could be. In a sense, I always wanted to play music, but that album solidified me and made me understand the potential of the medium, and I really wanted to do anything close to that.
Van Halen had their infamous "no brown M&Ms" clause in the tour rider back in the '80s - do you guys have anything crazy in your tour rider?
Not really. The craziest thing we have is socks, which are always useful on tour (but) we don't really get them. You're on tour, and I don't know what it is. I am the owner of so many pairs of damn socks, I can't even fit them all in my drawer. Yet somehow, you go on tour, and all of your socks are dirty. I don't know how it happens! I'll still have plenty of T-shirts, plenty of underwear, no problem, but even though I think I they've all somehow gotten dirty without me wearing them. I don't understand it. It's always cool if you can get fresh socks.
Whenever you see someone's rider that's got crazy stuff on it, unless it's Jennifer Lopez or something, you don't expect to get it because the one time someone has a big budget and they get it for you, it's awesome and hilarious. But you're not expecting you to get them only red M&Ms or whatever.
What's the strangest gig you've had - either because of where it was or how it went?
For both of those reasons, it was a place we played in Nelson, British Columbia. This was a while ago when we were doing one of our first tours in west-coast Canada.
If you look at a map of Canada, you'll notice there are very few major cities, and if you're touring across Canada, there's a whole lot of very long drives across those cities unless you want to play in empty fields for animals. So we were trying to get from somewhere to somewhere else, and there were no major cities in between, but there were a couple of smaller cities - and because it's a beneficial to get a few bucks rather than have a night off, we decided we'd play in a few of these cities.
We ended up in the place in Nelson, this little dingy bar, and when we got there, we discovered they thought we were a typical bar band. They said, "You know, just do three sets tonight of one hour each, and we'll be good." We said, "That's interesting, because what we do is play generally one set that's 40 minutes long, and then we go, because we're not a bar band. We don't play a lot of Axl Rose covers; we play our songs and we leave." So they go, "If you do that, we're not going to pay you." We ended up having to play two sets at this place, and we didn't have two hours' worth of songs; we didn't even have one hour's worth of songs, so we basically just were playing songs we hadn't played for years, really bad songs we hadn't played for years.
Fortunately for us, there was nobody there to watch us; nobody cared, so nobody saw us embarrass ourselves. In retrospect, it's pretty funny, but at the time it was just a horrible, mortifying experience.
What would mean more to you - going platinum or being able to date someone famous because you're a musician?
Going platinum. No question. If you go platinum, that means a million people bought your record. A million people liked your songs and bought them. I'm not talking about getting the money or whatever; that (just) means one million people thought your band was worth spending money on. ... Or: some vapid blonde Hollywood bimbo thinks it would be cool to date a guy in a band. She probably doesn't even know my personality - that's not good! That's not going to go anywhere. That's a doomed relationship. ... If they like me for me, then we'll see what happens.
Any last word for your fans here in the Cincinnati area?
We're sorry it's taken us this long to get there, but we're extremely excited about finally coming, so hopefully we'll see everyone at the show.
DON'T MISS: Tokyo Police Club with Harlem Shakes and Ruby Coast. 8 p.m. Tuesday, March 3 at Mad Hatter in Covington. $13-$15. 859-291-2233, www.tokyopoliceclub.com or www.madhatterclub.com
