Mute Math: Add It Up

Imagine teaming up with the guy who fired you from your last job and going on to own audiences from Europe to Warped Tour to mainstream America-including one passionate American Idol finalist. Welcome to the world of Mute Math, where things aren’t usually what they seem-no matter what you read on the internet.

Story: Tom Lanham

Photos: Chris Crisman

It was a dirty job, but it had to be done, which was unfortunate, because the experiment had started out nicely. In 2001, New Orleans-based keyboardist/vocalist Paul Meany rolled the dice on Darren King, a young, enthusiastic percussionist from Springfield, Missouri, inviting the kid to audition for Meany’s then-outfit, Earthsuit. The rest of the band were amenable to the idea at first; after all, what could possibly go wrong with this bushy-tailed, straight-out-of-high-school dude?

“The band just wound up despising it,” recalls the 31-year-old Meany on the phone from his home in Nashville, Tennessee. “Darren was upstaging our frontman, putting electric razors [up to] the microphone while the lead singer was trying to sing.” A month on the road with King was more than enough. Earthsuit took a vote; King was out, and Meany was elected to do the hatchet work.

“We were at this little motel on tour somewhere, and I went into Darren’s room, turned off the TV and said, ‘We’ve gotta talk,’” recalls Meany, who felt like a total heel. “I just broke it to him with, ‘Man, we’re gonna have to send you packing, this just ain’t gonna work,’ and he immediately started crying. He was only 18, and we were his first big heartbreak. It’s funny: Darren just turned 25 a month ago and we’d just had a great show in England somewhere. We had a toast, and I tried to reflect on what I was doing at 25. I remembered, ‘Oh, yeah! I was kicking Darren out of my old band!’”

Outsiders might find it shocking that these two polar opposites are still working together, creating textured, guitar-buttressed synth-rock in MuteMath. This time, Meany and King-along with guitarist Greg Hill and bassist Roy Mitchell-Cárdenas-are making an impact on listeners with their eponymous debut for Teleprompt/Warner Bros., as well as a decidedly indefatigable live show.

Thankfully for music fans, King was quite the glutton for punishment. Meany admits there was a “fuck you” phase between the two. “For about five months after the firing, we weren’t talking,” the singer recalls. “But I tried to make it so we weren’t burning a bridge; it just wasn’t meant to be at that point.” So King continued sending Meany demos of the music he was making back home in Missouri. He even agreed to another audition when the crumbling Earthsuit lost yet another drummer. That was the moment when protégé finally turned to peer.

“The rest of the band didn’t wanna go to this audition, so it was just me,” notes Meany, who left Louisiana for Tennessee in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. (He and his wife live in Spring Hill; King resides in nearby Antioch.) “But Darren just went for it. Within a five-minute song, he broke all his sticks and his snare drum; his cymbals all fell over, and he managed to blow the PA system that he was playing through. I don’t know how he did that. I remember it was such an onslaught of adrenaline, I thought, ‘Holy shit! I have got to be in a band with this guy. We’ve gotta figure out how to harness this power so he can make it through a 60-minute show.’” Long story short: Earthsuit dissolved; King and Meany began collaborating as a duo, emerging with “Typical” before Hill and Mitchell-Cárdenas were brought onboard.

But, hey, “No hard feelings,” says King, laughing, who sympathizes with Meany in retrospect. Brought up in a Christian household after his older siblings had already left the nest, he was raised as an only child with imaginary friends for comfort. “[It was an] entourage of imaginary friends,” the drummer stresses. “I had really elaborate fantasies about being a superhero in a rock band. I was the leader of this group of parentless superheroes who went to elementary school by day, living in a secret underground compound in the forest, and saved the world by night. I really got lost in that stuff, a lot of real Napoleon Dynamite-type scenarios. I’d race home from school and dance for hours, creating choreographed dance routines to Paula Abdul songs. I was an awkward, hyper, little kid.”

“Darren’s a real endearing guy,” Meany interjects. “You talk to him, and immediately you wanna be his friend-I don’t know if it’s out of pity or what.” Of course, it helped that King was actively looking for a role model when they met.

“I found a hero in Paul,” King admits. “I thought he was the coolest, most confident guy I’d ever met. So I followed him around and emulated him. My friends said, ‘Darren, you’re really starting to talk like Paul,’ because I was doing all his little mannerisms. I latched onto his personality because I didn’t like my own. I was so young and full of exuberance when I joined his band for the month; I was tough to be around. All I was trying to do was fit in, but [it] was the picture of trying too hard. So what I needed was a big disappointment.

“Paul calls [my Earthsuit experience] an ‘internship’ because that helps soften the blow,” says King about his participation in Meany’s previous outfit. “But I really wasn’t good enough. That’s all there was to it.”

These days, King needn’t worry. He’s doing just fine, judging by his marathon performances on the band’s recent live DVD, Flesh And Bones Electric Fun. With headphones strapped across his head like an electroshock patient, he flays furiously at his minimal kit like a man possessed, providing a powerful, yet precise undercurrent while Meany delivers impassioned vocals (occasionally while rocking the classic ’80s strap-on synthesizer, the keytar) and Hill and Mitchell-Cárdenas navigate guitar, bass, percussion and random keyboards (and, in Hill’s case, his entire pedal board during “Reset”). Anthemic songs like “Chaos,” “Control,” “Obsolete” and the definitive “Typical” sound positively panoramic in a live context. It’s not the least bit surprising Warner Bros. tapped the group to cover the Transformers theme for this summer’s blockbuster. “I hadn’t anticipated that song going before a council of bloggers who took this stuff very seriously,” says King, happy to have received a mostly thumbs-up verdict.

Being scrutinized by online comic-book nerds isn’t the first time Mute Math have faced prejudice. Ever seen that documentary Jesus Camp, where mullet-headed gradeschoolers are indoctrinated with religion by hardline evangelicals? Meany and King have.

“That was a great depiction of my childhood,” the singer cedes. “I saw it and thought, ‘Oh, my God! Someone captured it on film!’ Me and Darren were watching it, thinking ‘That’s exactly how we grew up.’ We were watching it with someone who was completely foreign to the whole thing, who said ‘This is detestable! What are these kids gonna become?’ Darren said, ‘They’ll probably just grow up to become a drummer for a band. They’ll be okay; they’ll figure it out.’”

Meany-a lapsed Christian who no longer attends church-thinks Mute Math have figured it all out now. Despite any faith-based group articles fans may find on the web, he wants to set the record straight, once and for all. His old outfit Earthsuit started out as a Christian combo, signing to an appropriate label, Sparrow. “It was our college experience, if you will, to realize what we realized,” he explains. “Which was, ‘You know what? This Christian-band thing is not for me.’ What I also found out was, it’s extremely difficult to do that-to play and travel around as a Christian band and then suddenly say you don’t wanna be a Christian band anymore-then try to take the next step.”

For a while, Meany and King kicked around New Orleans with
Earthsuit’s old vocalist Adam LaClave in an outfit called MACROSICK. They showcased for every possible label, but no one stepped up to sign them. King and Meany signed to Teleprompt (a label formed by two of Meany’s close friends) as Mute Math as part of a developmental deal that would possibly be upstreamed to Warners.. “But I think what wound up happening initially was, it was deemed we had no radio hit, but there was potential,” he says. “So Word [Warner’s Christian imprint] started jumping up and down, saying they knew what to do because I was in Earthsuit. All of a sudden, we found out [the Reset EP] was coming out on Word, which was not really what we signed up for.” Next thing Meany knew, he was swooped upon by various religious media outlets, resulting in a number of stories floating around on the ’net. “I’d been there, done that and I didn’t wanna do it again, because it felt like a dead-end road. So we slammed on the brakes, filed suit, took control of our music and put it out ourselves.”

The lawsuit-Teleprompt claiming breach of contract and negligent misrepresentation-ended amicably, out of court, with Mute Math being distributed through Warners proper. “The way it ended up was the way it was intended to start,” says Meany, sighing. “We just had to take the scenic route.”

But what does he think when acolytes get it wrong? Will the Christian market ever truly let Mute Math go? Meany, who calls himself a “universalist,” is remarkably Zen-like about the situation.

“To me, there’s a difference between the [Christian music] industry and the people,” he summarizes. “We love the Christian community. In actuality, it’s what has supported me musically through a lot of my life, and it’s why I’m here. But it was the industry, the system side of it, that was the extremely disheartening part, and that’s what we fought to get out of.

“I think there are people out there who believe that Mute Math is a Christian band, and no matter what any of us say, that’s what we are to them,” Meany resigns. “That’s how it works in their heads. And that’s fine; we can’t control the way people think. But we have a specific-and different-way that we at least look at it, if people really wanna know the truth.”

These days, King-who once treasured a cross he caught at a concert by Christian MOR crooner Carmen-has a more relaxed view on his once-dogmatic faith. “I’ve traveled a lot; I’ve seen the world; I’ve learned a lot,” he relates. “And I see that a lot of the things I held on to really hard weren’t necessary and weren’t even good. It’s inevitable that you grow up and find yourself. I understand now that it’s imperative to embrace your doubts, recognize them and confront them because good people doubt. That’s what I believe.”

The band are still trying to negotiate the Christian-versus-secular impasse fans on both sides routinely get hung up on. But with an ambitious debut disc, and a spirited live show that’s touched audiences ranging from indie hipsters to self-entitled denizens of Warped Tour to mainstream music fans lining up to buy the Fray’s merch, Mute Math seem unstoppable.

“There haven’t been many people who’ve gotten us at first listen,” Meany resigns. “It’s always taken some time. With Mute Math, it’s been a slow conversion process. But anyone who comes to see us a second, third time through their town? I guarantee they’ll have an absolutely incredible time.”