Recoil: Interview
November 2005
Five years ago, Relient K lead singer/guitarist Matt Thiessen had just quit his job at Wendy’s in the small town of Canton, Ohio, so he could go on the road with his pop-punk band and have some fun. Looking back on the moment now, he still remembers his coworkers telling him how they knew he would become famous and make it on MTV and how he stopped, looked them in the eyes, and told them he never would. Now, with mmhmm, Relient K’s fifth album, and first on a major label, debuting at Number 15, going gold in less than a year, and its two singles, “Be My Escape” and “Who I Am Hates Who I’ve Been,” making it onto, of all places, MTV’s Total Request Live, Thiessen might just have to eat his words the next time he has a Wendy’s hamburger. It shouldn’t be such a surprise to him, though, because Relient K has taken a lot of little steps in reaching pop-punk stardom. After naming themselves after guitarist Matt Hoopes’ beat-up old Plymouth (intentionally misspelling the name to avoid a lawsuit) and releasing some typical teenage tomfoolery with their first few albums, the band broke through with 2003’s Two Lefts Don’t Make A Right… But Three Do. The album reached the Top 40 in sales and garnered the band a Grammy Nomination for Best Rock Gospel Performance. They then moved on from the Christian indie-label Gotee Records, co-owned by DC Talk’s Toby McKeehan, to Capitol Records for mmhmmm, as their sound began to appeal to a wider audience. Recoil got up to speed on Relient K with Thiessen via phone during the afternoon before the taping of Relient K’s Hard Rock Live performance in Orlando.
Recoil: How does it feel to be co-headlining with MXPX, one of the bands that was among your first influences when you started Relient K?
Matt Thiessen: It’s pretty weird. Especially the first show of the tour – we had to headline. There are a lot of really weird things about it. There was this music festival one time we were supposed to play back in 2000, the Cornerstone Music Festival. Our band had just come out and we didn’t get to play the festival, but we had managed to finagle ourselves a slot playing right after MXPX was done. We got to go up and play five songs. It turns out, we were there all week promoting it, trying to get people to come watch us and they finished their set and the lighting guy, and the monitor guy and the front house guy, they all left. They said, ‘We’re not sticking around for this.’ [Laughs] So basically it was the worst thing ever. It was funny because we were playing after MXPX then and now the first show of this tour were playing after MXPX. It’s really weird. This tour we feel is like redemption for that moment. They’re really great guys. They’re really good friends of ours and we got to hang out with them on Warped Tour.
R: What was it like for you touring with the Warped Tour this past summer? How well do you think you fit in with the other bands on the tour?
MT: You know it worked out fine. It almost felt like we were a need band being on it, but we had really good crowds. We definitely did not have the smallest crowds of all the bands. As far as hanging out with all the bands, it’s great. Everybody’s really open. It’s fun to be able to hang out with people from completely different situations; we don’t share the same beliefs or whatever, but we’re still friends and we all respect each other. It’s just a really good time. It’s funny, one of my better friends from Warped Tour, one of my favorite guys to hang out with, was the bass player from Atreyu, and that band couldn’t be any more different from our band.
R: You’re playing a number of colleges on this tour, how much do you think the constant word of mouth about bands that occurs on college campuses has helped your band?
MT: I feel like it’s pretty cool. Obviously with college kids these days there’s a lot of downloading and stuff like that. Some people still have the integrity to go out and buy the record. Colleges are cool how everything gets around and everybody gets into different stuff. I feel like there’s a lot of feedback that we get from kids who went to school and said that their friends hooked them up with our record.
R: Your live lineup is now a five-piece. How different, or at least bigger, is your sound live?
MT: Obviously I haven’t been able to tell because I can’t go watch our show. I hear that the additional guitar makes some spots a lot more full. Obviously [new guitarist] John [Schneck] will cover up the second guitar spot when I’m playing piano which was pretty much the main reason why we needed the guy. When we would record stuff, we would still treat it like we were a four-piece, with two guitars, bass and drums and just throwing piano on top of it, so it’s good to be able to pull off more things from the record. John’s also covering things like bells and banjo and different things like that.
R: Was that more of a move, then, to capture some of the musical departures you made with your new album, mmhmm?
MT: Yeah, and we still want to keep pushing that. It’s just a matter of logistics sometimes. I’d love to have a B3 organ out on the tour, but that thing, they’re like twenty thousand dollars. That would be nice, but we’ll probably get another keyboard that has some cool organ patches on it and have John take care of that. We’ve had three days of practice as a band since January, and that’s all we’ve had to use for this, because we’ve been touring so much and our [new] bass player [John Warne] (who replaced original bassist Brian Pittman) just got married, so it would be nice to get some rehearsal time in. Right now all five of us are singing at one point in the set which is a first for us so that’s kind of cool.
R: Speaking of multiple members singing and trying new things, I understand you’re a big Beach Boys fan. How big of an influence were the things they tried on what you wanted to try with mmhmm?
MT: Definitely from a production standpoint, like Brian Wilson’s influence, as far as adding in instruments. Even now when we recorded a new song we threw some accordion in there. That’s something Brian would do. I really like that those are organic instruments and I like all the harmonies and stuff. I don’t feel like somebody could pick up on a ton of Beach Boys influences by listening to our record. Hopefully, that will be a little more obvious on our next record, who knows? It’s there in its subtleties.
R: Your lyrics have been mostly a mix of clever and witty jokes and personal experiences. Why did you decide on moving in a somewhat more serious and more meaningful direction with most of the new songs?
MT: It was just a natural progression. On our last record we started to drift in that direction but we were still holding onto some older, cheesier things that we liked. NOFX and MXPX and Less Than Jake, those are all influences that have some cheesy songs, like ‘Chick Magnet’ and stuff like that, but they’re influences, so that comes across in our music too. On our new record, the influences are changing a little bit and we’re obviously just getting older and stuff so the songwriting changes. NOFX is still highly influential on songs like ‘Maintain Consciousness,’ but that’s kind of a black sheep on the record anyway.
R: Why is your upcoming EP (due out Nov. 8) titled Apathetic?
MT: Oh, because there’s a song on there called ‘Apathetic Way To Be.’ That song was a B-side from the last record and it’s kind of sarcastic. There’s a couple of themes on the last record about this girlfriend I had at the time who was really into stuff, like clothes, and she lived in L.A. and it was just so annoying, and that apathetic song was really about being apathetic to celebrity America and possessions and stuff like that and looking at what’s important and not being apathetic about that.
- Recoil