A Conversation with Titus Andronicus

Patrick Stickles: People actually come to the shows now. There’s a spirit … better turnouts.

PS: That one’s pretty cool but the concerts are more validating.

Ian Graetzer: The concerts because people are reading things like that.

PS: That’s true.

IG: There’s an even a more diverse audience than when we did when we were touring with the last album. (Interviewer’s note: The Airing of Grievances: Also highly recommended!) Like I feel a lot more women come to the shows than before.

PS: After the last album there’s a lot of older people.

IG: Yeah. Older people.

PS: And now it’s just all over the spectrum. There’s even more ethic diversity I’d say to our crowds.

IG: Yeah, slightly more.

PS: Not really jamming -

IG: Changing in the sense we didn’t have all the things we did when making the album. Doing what we can do to get it done live to make it happen live as well.

PS: I tell you now it takes on a little more of its own identity. Because like you said, it is different. We’re pretty much starting … not from scratch but it’s slightly changed arrangements, more so than jamming. Just all the notes you hear are pretty much representing things you hear on the record. They’re just arranged a bit differently.

PS: A lot of contributors.

IG: But not all at the same time.

PS: You feel like you’ve been doing this forever.

IG: You mean like from before you started recording it to after recording?

PS: It’s pretty static, right? We’re pretty flexible.

PS: Pretty much do most of it, the song writing, but I don’t like to make a big deal out of it.

PS: Graduating college into the adult world.

PS: From observing. Pretty much trying to achieve unity … communities amongst personal relationships. Creating an album out of different elements of your personality clashing with one another.

PS: Well, two reasons. My brother’s in the Navy and he taught me how to play guitar when I was a kid. He’s a big influence, one of out biggest supporters, always giving us bags of stuff when we go on tour. So it’s a little bit of an homage to him.

PS: It’s something pretty long. So I wanted an image of something sort of lumbering, kind of slightly prehistoric. The ship was sort of like that. It was a very crazy design for its time; more amphibious than the standard battle ship of the day. And also … I kind of wanted to name it after a dinosaur as well; couldn’t really do that because there weren’t any dinosaurs in the Civil War but there is such a creature as the monitor, a lizard. The monitor was sort of like a creature that lived in the water.

PS: (Nods.) That’s right. There’s Monitor Street but there’s no appropriate flags or historic markers. Nobody drives near it.

IG: It’s across from an old sewage waste plant.

PS: It’s probably not in a part of the neighborhood that you’d go out of way to visit unless you had an interest in it.

PS: No we’re going to go to Europe for a little while … but possibly … I don’t know what the next move will be. We’ll have to see what the future holds. But that’ll probably be promoting our general brand.

IG: We’ll entertain. We’ll provide entertainment services for the world.

PS: It is and it isn’t.

PS: You know, playing major chords and stuff. And I guess the songs are a lot longer than regular punk songs some of the time.

IG: I think that meant more to the parents.

David Brooks: It was cool, but it wasn’t the greatest … it was definitely fun but I wouldn’t say -

IG: It was an experience.

Eric Harm: Yeah, but I wouldn’t say it was like the crowning of my -

DB: You and I pulled in there at like eight AM or whatever. We just kind of sat there until about 5:30 and – I said it was cool, this is not a complaint but you really sat in a room for eight hours and then played for three minutes and we’re like “High Five! Cool! That was fun!” And then turned around and left.

DB: We played the song four times during the soundcheck.

PS: We played for like three and a half minutes and that’s like three percent of what we would usually play when we get together. There’s not much contact besides David and Eric. We usually have some time to really get into it, into feeling the show, to get going. I mean it was weird.

EH: That’s what I’m saying. It was a really long day and then it was over before it started.

DB: But it was great. Don’t get me wrong. It was fun, an interesting thing. Something we never planned on doing; got to do it. That was cool.

PS: Yeah, we have a Butthole Surfers epigram.

PS: Just kind of illustrating … trying to track the transmutability of those sort of particular human behavior and how it was represented for me growing up by the ever present football player rapist: the archetype I thought of torturing me when I was a kid even though it maybe was largely imagined.

PS: No I’ve never seen them. Just curious but maybe I will before I die. But I guess they’re back now. (Interviewer’s note: PS must’ve heard something through the underground grapevine because how else to explain the announcement of two BHS shows in Austin, Texas at then end of October?) I never saw them in their hey day. I’ve really heard a lot about them.

IG: Or anywhere else in the world.

PS: It’ll be daunting. It’ll be okay. We’re just going to do our best, you know? The same as we’ll do tonight, Whatever happens, happens. We’ll try to control over it what we can. Try to play good.

IG: I guess when we started this band it wasn’t we’re going to make it and do this and do this. When it all happened … when we were able to just tour … it just wasn’t that kind of jam to do everything to climb up the ladder so, if it was to end I would personally feel like we did a lot of good stuff that was okay. It would be going onto something else. Some other bands would do everything they could to hang on. So it’s acknowledging that. Whatever happens, happens.

PS: You try and that’s all you can really do.

DB: There’s too many things like you’re tired, you have to drive a lot, you have to stay up, if want to worry about things like that, you want to worry about how many tickets you sold, who’s going to come to your shows and all that, you’d just drive yourselves crazy. There are so many things you can easily be negative about. There’s no point in that. You have zero control over that. You’d be wasting your time so you might as well worry about what you do have control over.

EH: You just grab on for the wild ride.

PS: We’re just regular people doing our best like anyone else.

PS: Maybe this band we’re touring with Free Energy. That’s kind of one reason we have them on tour. We think they’re great. Hopefully everybody else will agree.

PS: Philadelphia. Originally from Minneapolis apparently. Minnesota. They really rock.

PS: We could say that our friend Andrew Cedermark’s got a new album that just came out this past week or something. (Interviewer’s note: Andrew Cedermark’s Moon Deluxe was released September 14, 2010.)

PS: That’s what’s going on in my life that I’m interested in.

DB: I just finished The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter. That’s a great book. Oprah’s book club. We all kind of read. Like Eric’s reading that book now. People just grab them in the van. We sort pass them along.

EH: I just read Moby Dick.

EH: Pretty dry. I think I liked a lot of it. I thought it was really funny actually. I think that Herman Melville knew that using the word semen or sperm on every other page wasn’t entirely scientific.

EH: The sperm whale as the phallic symbol.

EH: I liked learning about it. It was kind of like walking through mud at some points. But I decided I wanted to read it and I did.

DB: That’s how we should do everything. Keep it up.

EH: But in the end I think it was worth it.

PS: I read a book called Eon by Greg Bear. This hard sci fi epic about this mysterious asteroid that appears in earth’s orbit but they find out it’s some kind of ancient civilization from the future. And there’s lot of other stuff that happens. I got it because I was really intrigued that the synopsis was on the back cover but continued onto the first page of the book. It was incredibly long.

DB: Also on this tour the three of us all read what I believe to be the ultimate novel by Charles Bukowski: Women. Basically just him having a lot of sexual encounters with all sorts of different people.

DB: Oh that! Yeah yeah yeah … when he gets lost and he wonders what the papers would say. He’s like messing around. And the floodgates are opening. Yeah, we had a discussion about that earlier in the tour that was interesting how so many parts are about such a detestable guy but you really –

DB: Yeah you like him but I don’t know if it’s because he was the voice of the book or if he’s in just so many parts of the book.

DB: Yeah he’s funny so you just kind of like -

EH: I think you’ll find that the things that he does aren’t as extreme as they seem on paper. It’s like he puts it in a very blunt way. Like a lot of people do shitty things without really thinking about it, without feeling bad about it so you’re interested, without really expressing remorse. They don’t try to romanticize it or him anything like that or some other folks would. The nature of his relationships. That rare thing. A lot of people probably live like that.

DB: Well, a lot of people I know live that way.

IG: I hate The Sex Pistols. I don’t like anything about them.

DB: I don’t like them either.

IG: So I guess The Clash.

PS: I used to really love The Sex Pistols more … a few years ago. But their schtick is starting to wear a little bit thin. For me. They’ve actually started to get a whole prankster. But The Clash also were that, let’s not forget.

IG: I feel like The Clash didn’t put up the front.

PS: Of course they were, they talked about how they were revolutionaries and stuff but they -

IG: I don’t like English punk to be honest so. But if I had to choose one it would be The Clash.

IG: Not so much in England. I don’t mean it’s the same kind of people but what a sixteen year old does here does the same thing over there. Kind of more or less the same thing.

PS: It’s all it ever is. Be peaceful and calm. The other day we stayed at our friend’s house and she burned some sage over the bed that I slept in. That was pretty zen like.

(Laughter)