INTERVIEW: ZUCKERBABY Nov 15, 2000
INTERVIEWER: Do you think it's more challenging to be a touring band in Canada than the States?
REED: Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot less people up here and they're spread out over a very wide distance, so yeah, it's very difficult.
INTERVIEWER: Have you done any touring in the East? I know there's quite a gap from Quebec City to anywhere else.
REED: Actually, if you ask me, the biggest gap is more in the West. But yeah, we have been out to the Maritimes once. It was in the dead of winter. We drove all the way from Calgary to PEI in the dead of winter and it was brutal. I don't mind telling ya, it was brutal.
INTERVIEWER: What do you think is the biggest influence on your songwriting?
REED: It's really hard to say. Andy and I are into so many different things.
ANDREW: ... and at different times. As time goes by we'll pull out old records and dust them off, [records] that we haven't heard since we were kids or in different times, maybe before we met each other and get into them again or discover some new things. That's always playing a daily role in what's making up your inspiration. 
REED: We're equally into records that came out last week as we are records that came out in '65. All that stuff, you take it all in and spit it back out. Hopefully that's why we sound like us.
INTERVIEWER: What CDs do you have with you right now?
REED: I have the new U2, the Dandy Warhols, I have Van Halen I. The Verve, the Richard Ashcroft solo album, I have Travis. I have a Beatles compilation.
INTERVIEWER: What about you Andy?
ANDREW: I don't know, I can't think right now. I haven't listened to any of my CDs really on this trip, but I have a pack of them somewhere.
REED: He usually has, if I can speak for you, a real mixture of old and new. On the last leg we dug a Led Zepplin CD out of his bag. He had a Bowie album in there at one point.
ANDREW: There's always some kind of U2 album, an old Tom Waits record for those dreary night drives.
REED: You can see there's a huge [variety].
INTERVIEWER: Is there anything that one of you listens to that the other goes "How can you listen to that?"
REED: I don't know, I don't really think so. There are definitely things that I'm way more into or he's more into, but I don't think there's anything that we offend each other with. Except for that time when I was really into the new 'Nsynch record, Andy was just down on me [about that], finally I had to quit listening to it. (laughter)
INTERVIEWER: In general, do you think it's the songs that come together quickly that you're happiest about, or the ones where there's an initial idea, and then a lot of work needed to finish it?
REED: Interesting question. I think it can be both. I think a lot of the best songs I've written are the ones that just kind of come to you. But I think there is some merit to a song that you slave over to make it perfect and work at [it] over a long period of time. What do you think?
ANDREW: I don't know. I always come up with stuff and leave it alone for a while until it finishes itself off or I take it to Reed and we compile ideas, try and stretch them out a bit, make them better. Or make them meaningful for that time when you write them.
REED: The very best songs that we write are songs where we have input on each other's ideas. I might have a song and I'll get it to the point where I think it's pretty good but when I play it for Andy he'll change the melody just a little bit and then add lyrics to it.
INTERVIEWER: You have been writing together for a while now. Do you still amaze each other when you bring songs to each other?
REED: Oh yeah, all the time. I'd like to say that it happens more often than not but we still bring each other some "thumbs-downers" …
INTERVIEWER: How do you deal with that?
REED: Well, we've been doing this so long that it's not nearly as difficult as it might have been at first. Andy and I are different. I can tell more from the way he reacts to [a song] than anything he actually says. I think I have to sit with it a bit.
INTERVIEWER: If you could magically go back and get songwriting credits for a song by someone else, what song would it be?
REED: I don't know. That's a really tough question because, again, there are so many songs that, to me, for different reasons, are songwriting masterpieces. Some of them are simple four chord songs that just have that magical element, and others are these opuses of chord changes and melody.
INTERVIEWER: Ok, I can give you a few choices, I'll be generous.
ANDREW: Ok. "With or Without You" is a big one for me.
REED: "With or Without You" is a classic case of one of those songs… it's a four chord song and the chords don't change for the whole bloody song but there's something magical about the way it happens. Then there are other songs like … a lot of Beatles' songs. One that I'm particularly fond of is "Here, There, and Everywhere". Every time that I listen to that song I go "how in the fuck did he think of that?" I think it's absolutely brilliant. So there's two anyway, not to say that those are the only two.
INTERVIEWER: How about you Andrew?
ANDREW: I don't know. What's the most played song on radio? (laughter) Give me the royalties. I don't know, I never really think about that kind of thing. I just try and take from whatever I'm listening to and learn from it, write and try to stay true to whatever it is that I can see. There are a million probably.
INTERVIEWER: After the pressure of getting an album out and dealing with record company issues, where is Zuckerbaby going now?
REED: I don't know. I don't think we'll know until that moment is right in front of us. What do you think?
ANDREW: I have no idea man. Things are pretty bleak right now in rock and roll. It's going to take a pretty big band to kick it open again, like when Guns n' Roses came out in '87 and changed everything. It's going to take a band, maybe not like that, but there's going to have to be some earthy, guttural, sweat and blood kind of band to come back out and really reclaim it's place. Then the pendulum will swing back again. It's a dangerous time right now and I can't believe there hasn't been a backlash yet against the whole fabrication. I'm really sick of it. Before, it was kind of a casual joke and stuff, but it's become a big, big joke. What happened to coming and watching four guys sweat it out and turn you on with the material that they wrote and created themselves about life on the street that they live. What happened to that? Competing with raves and stuff like that, and I have nothing against that whole culture, but the kind of money that goes into a rave with explosions and lights and stuff, you're not going to see that at a club like this. What you are going to see is people who are living and dying on every word and every note that they play. That's always been the real deal to me and if people can't see that I feel sorry for the public at large.
INTERVIEWER: That puts a singer/songwriter type of group in a questionable place.
ANDREW: It's in a real dangerous spot right now. Brilliant songwriters in that ilk are being cast aside. Like Ron Sexton, who just lost his deal with Interscope. Here's a guy who's heralded as one of the best songwriters ever heard by people like Paul McCartney. Paul McCartney said that about Ron Sexton?! And he's not selling any records?! Well, it's a sad, sad state right now.
INTERVIEWER: You've mentioned past interviews that the new album is more textured than the debut. Where do you think the next album will fit in?
ANDREW: It's hard to say you know. You play so many roles. You take your songs, and they're just songs, like they can be played on an acoustic guitar, just bashed out. But then you have to texture it, you have to supe them up to fit something. Where do you fit in? We're all into really raw rock and roll, from AC/DC to the Black Crowes to early Rod Stewart, anything like that. If we're as sick of the whole thing as we say we are our next record might well be something that's a lot more bare-bones, a lot more stripped down. Or, it could be … we might even go further into lush atmospheric territory and just make a real headphone record. Not like Radiohead or anything, but something that's just song-based and really slick. I don't think we really know until we get the songs together and then those songs dictate the way record is going to sound. You can only treat a song so much in production.
REED: One of the beautiful things about this band as well is that we can cover all that ground. We can do a roots record. We can do a straight-ahead rock record or we could do an album of atmospheric ballads.
ANDREW: We could do strings and that kind of thing on recordings, to rootsy sounding stuff, to traditional ballads, to touchy feely kind of songs. That's what we tried to do on our first record. I think we were a bit naïve in a good way, and we've lost that a bit because the business kind of paints you a bit. On the first record we always compared ourselves to Queen in that we had a song like Valentine that was a traditional sounding ballad, very lovey, then we had really heavy pop stuff like "Belly Button Queen of Venus". Then we had something more atmospheric that's more like our later stuff like "Heavy" and "Andromeda". So we've been all over the place. We always wanted to keep those doors open. Since we did it on our first record I think we could go back to any one of those things totally or in part and be justified in doing so and not take too much heat about it. It's really hard to go back after and re-write the book. On our first record, even though it sounds like a band off the floor just recording their songs they are going in different directions. There are probably three or four different solid directions that we tried to go in and I think that's great because it gives us a chance to do whatever we want within that.
INTERVIEWER: Zuckerbaby has a production credit on Platinum Again. Is it hard to be objective in the studio when you're switching hats between artist and producer?
ANDREW: Reed has more of an interest in the production and always has. This second record that we did with John McLean, those guys inspired a lot of things. We all had input. I don't know if I can speak for him or not, but I don't think he thinks about it that much, it's more like "This is our song, I want to make sure this song sounds like us". If he's got an idea, he's going to speak. If there's a conflict then we work it out.
REED: Production for us is not as big a deal as it might be for some other bands because we rehearse a lot and it's important to us to be a great live band. When we're writing a song, we're rehearsing, fine tuning, so that when we get to the state that we're ready to record them there's not a whole lot of production things to be done other than "What sound should we do this with" that we always do anyway. We do add extras that you'll see if you see the show tonight. Even the most produced songs, we can still play them as a four-piece band and it'll come out great because that's where they start from, and ultimately, that's where they end up.
ANDREW: And the extra production is just that, extra. It warrants people listening to it again hopefully; I think that's the goal. It's like an extra spice thrown into the soup that's already there, and it's still tasty. We just learned that on a record people need something that warrants them hitting the repeat button or something like that. We just wanted to make a deeper sounding, more textured record this time. We were working in a great studio with a producer who was "guns a blazing" ready to go and eager to try new things to bring what he could to the project. So it just kind of unfolded from there. It always starts with a friendship or a bond. We met John and hit it off really well with him as a guy, just as a guy talking about music or sports or whatever. He was always the guy who would say, "Why are you doing that?" "I don't know". "Well, I don't think it's working". Then we'd have to rethink something. Or he'd say, "Why are you doing that, I don't really get it". "Well here's why". "Oh, I see what you're trying to do but you're not quite getting there so maybe try something else. You need somebody with an objective ear. When you're working with four of the same guys for a period of time you just assume certain roles sometimes and you become kind of complacent. Or you do the same things a lot because they work and there's nothing wrong with that. But then having somebody in there that has nothing to gain or lose by saying "Why?" Then you have to say,"Well, because we're trying to get across this idea".
Interview by Brian
Benwell for
and
SIN CITY
ANDREW: And the extra production is just that, extra. It warrants people listening to it again hopefully; I think that's the goal. It's like an extra spice thrown into the soup that's already there, and it's still tasty. We just learned that on a record people need something that warrants them hitting the repeat button or something like that. We just wanted to make a deeper sounding, more textured record this time. We were working in a great studio with a producer who was "guns a blazing" ready to go and eager to try new things to bring what he could to the project. So it just kind of unfolded from there. It always starts with a friendship or a bond. We met John and hit it off really well with him as a guy, just as a guy talking about music or sports or whatever. He was always the guy who would say, "Why are you doing that?" "I don't know". "Well, I don't think it's working". Then we'd have to rethink something. Or he'd say, "Why are you doing that, I don't really get it". "Well here's why". "Oh, I see what you're trying to do but you're not quite getting there so maybe try something else. You need somebody with an objective ear. When you're working with four of the same guys for a period of time you just assume certain roles sometimes and you become kind of complacent. Or you do the same things a lot because they work and there's nothing wrong with that. But then having somebody in there that has nothing to gain or lose by saying "Why?" Then you have to say,"Well, because we're trying to get across this idea".