Interview: A Rocket To The Moon's Nick Santino on Nashville, Taylor Swift and their new album

A Rocket To The Moon recorded their second full-length—which is due sometime this summer—in Nashville with producer Mark Bright, who’s best known for his work with country superstar Carrie Underwood. The pairing was a natural one for the Boston area-band, whose members are avowed country fans. In fact, frontman Nick Santino couldn’t be happier with how the still-untitled album came out. The frontman chatted with AP from his home in Braintree, Massachusetts, right before the band headed to Nashville to put the “final touches” on the record.

Now that the album is finally almost done, what can you say about it?
It just sounds like we are growing up. We haven’t put out a record in about three years—and that’s a really long time, especially when it’s your job to play music. It gets kind of tiring to play the same couple of songs over and over again for three years straight, so putting out this new stuff is going to be awesome.

We toured for three years straight—the way we were all playing together as a band, we went in and recorded like that. The bones of all the songs on the [new] record, we sat in the studio in a big, live tracking room. We were all isolated, and we recorded all together. We would go through 13 songs, and we would do each one like 30 times, just to get a good take. We would take the bones of that [and] a couple weeks later, we’d go back and clean up some of the guitar parts, go back and re-do some of that stuff. Then we’d put all the candy on top, like the vocals and the backup vocals.

For the most part, these songs were just recorded live for the nice full-band sound. We sound like a band on the record. We don’t sound like we were made in a studio; we don’t sound like the songs were just put together in the studio. Genre-wise, we didn’t change too much, but when we recorded On Your Side, we were only listening to certain bands. Over the last few years, we’ve all matured musically. We listen to everything. Before [we were] stubborn, young kids that only wanted to listen to certain bands. Now, we literally listen to everything.

I think all of our influences went into this new record, writing it and recording it—anything from Johnny Cash to Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers to some pop that’s on Top 40 radio right now. We took everything we listen to as a band and made songs like that. Kids are going to see that when they hear it. They’re going to be like, “This makes sense. I always see them tweeting about this band or tweeting about what they think of this kind of music.”

How did recording in Nashville influence the album?
It was very influential. Our producer—his name is Mark Bright—is a big time Nashville country producer. He’s done every Carrie Underwood record and song—anything she needs done, he is her man. [He also did] the early Rascal Flatts records, Scotty McCreery, the other American Idol winner, and a lot of country. For us being country fans, we were like, “We want to have that.”

There’s something about the country world—and I can’t really figure it out—but they’re on their own planet with stuff. Everything in Nashville revolves around music, and that’s the only city you’ll find that in. There’s guys that just work for the music union down there, and you just call up that union and you’re like, “Hey, I need somebody to play fiddle and slide guitar in a song,” and the guys come in. They play it and then they get paid from their union. It’s just their job. It’s insane. You can’t find that anywhere else. It was cool to see that stuff come together, because it’s all new to all of us.

Our producer, like I said, is a country producer, and we like the idea of going down to Nashville and doing it with a country producer, because they do their records so well and they put their records together so well. It kind of worked out great for us, because Mark was looking for a pop/rock band [to work with]. He was like, “I’ve been doing country forever. For years I’ve been doing country records. I kind of want to do something different.” And we were like, “Weird, because we’re a rock band and we kind of want to go with a country producer,” so it works out perfect. Somehow the stars aligned, and a couple phone calls and meetings later, we locked down Mark and both him and us. We couldn’t be happier with the result that we’ve come out with.

I think it’s cool for a band like us to go in with a producer like that, because I feel like everybody expects us to go with a cliché pop/rock band producer. When we announced we were going to go into the studio with Mark Bright, people were like, “Wait, he’s a country producer. He’s done only Rascal Flatts and Carrie Underwood. What is Rocket doing? Are Rocket becoming a country band?” It’s like, “No, it’s way beyond that. This dude is a genius.” Sitting in the room with him, it’s unreal. I don’t know how to explain it, but something about him just being in the room starts this fire in all of us, and we’re just so on fire to be there.

He has this way of doing things and you’re like, “That should be the only way people do things when it comes to recording a record. How can people do it differently?” It’s a very raw, natural way of recording, and we loved it. We loved every second of it. Playing every note, doing everything by ourselves and then sitting in the room listening to the song on the playback, we’d be like, “All right, well this should go here,” and he’d be like, “Okay,” and then he would just go up to his office where he has crazy amounts of instruments and he’s like, “Hey, play this instrument. We’re gonna put it on here.” We don’t even know what the instrument is. We’d play it on there and be like, “Yes. Holy crap. How did you know that’s what [we wanted]?” He just has a good ear for that stuff.

I was just going to ask you what the biggest difference has been working with a country producer, and you started answering that question already. Do you have anything else to add to that?
Mark works with singers. [When] he works with Carrie Underwood, he only focuses on her; his only concern is making sure Carrie sounds great. But they have their hired guns come in and play their guitar and drums all together, and they knock those tracks out in like a day. Then they get the music and they go and bring Carrie in.

Him working with a band that actually plays their own stuff is a treat for everybody. We’re all pretty good musicians, but we’re nowhere near the guys that he hires to come in and play on a Carrie Underwood track, so him going and seeing us play our own record was kind of inspiring for him. It was almost like he was going back to his early days of recording, where that’s how it was. It was kind of cool. It was very, very cool and new for both of us.

We learned off each other. He learned and a lot from us and we learned a lot from him.

Usually you don’t find that. You find producers who are directing and guiding bands—or bands go in and they know exactly what they want and they’re directing the producer. It’s very a rare to see that mutually beneficial relationship.
Yeah, he’s a big time, big name producer—he’s very well known in Nashville. When we would tell people like friends and bands and stuff who we were going with, they would be like, “So, does he even really do anything? Does he come to the studio? Does he have engineers and assistants [to record] and he’s out doing other stuff?” It may seem that since he does some big names like Carrie and stuff that he’ll step a foot in for five minutes and then leave it up to Todd, our engineer, to do everything, but there was not a second he was outside the studio unless we took a lunch break for 45 minutes. He was in the studio, like, 11 hours of the day with us.

We thought maybe there were going to be days where he’s busy and that he needs to go out of town to do his Carrie stuff, and we’re going to go record just with our engineer. [But Mark] had his time for the month for our band and that’s what he did for the entire month: He focused on our band and nothing else. It’s kind of cool to see that, like, “Hey, Carrie Underwood can wait for a second because we have A Rocket To The Moon in the studio.” It’s kind of awesome.
 

Lyrically, what kind of things did you end up talking about? I know you had some ideas when we talked for the Most Anticipated issue, so now that it’s almost done, what was the end result?
Not much has changed. When we talked about the Most Anticipated stuff, we had a majority of the songs written, and we knew which ones we were taking in. We actually put thought into these songs. [I’m] not saying we didn’t do that on On Your Side, but when we were writing On Your Side, we were so excited to do our first record. We just wanted to write songs and put them on the record, so we didn’t put a lot of thought into the lyrics; we just wrote lyrics that sounded cool.

For this one, we really thought about the story and then went into writing lyrics. There’s songs about going out and hanging out with your friends; there’s a breakup song; and then there’s a song about [how] you have to go through the crap for the good stuff to show through. That’s a song called “Lost And Found,” which is one of my favorite songs. It’s a piano balled kind of song, but it’s just saying you need to get lost before you get found. I think it’s something we’ve never really written as a band before. We’re used to writing the girly love songs about going through relationships and getting broken up with, so I think we wrote some songs where kids are going to hear it and be like, “Yes, this is why I’ve been growing up with this band the last few years—they get what I want to listen to.” That was kind of the cool part about writing, because we really could think, like, “Okay, we’ve written the love songs, we’ve written the hate song, we’ve written this song, we’ve written that song. Let’s live a little different. Let’s write something we don’t usually write about.”

And that’s kind of a country music way of doing it, too. They tell stories.
[When] Justin [Richards] and I write, we try to do the story thing, not just because we’re country fans. That’s the last thing on our minds. [In] a good song, you need to know what the people are talking about. You don’t want to just listen to the song and be like, “What the hell? They’re saying, ‘Oh, I love you, I’m into you,’ but what is that even really saying? It’s the same lyrics they put in the last song.” When we write our lyrics, we really try to paint the picture. We want people to be able to close their eyes and picture this boy pulling up to his girlfriend’s house in his car and what color shirt he’s wearing. We want to make a movie in your head.

Down the road, if we do music videos for certain songs, it’s the easiest thing to get a nice video out there, because it goes straight with the lyrics. Our last single off our of first record was the easiest video to do, because the lyrics were so vivid and they painted the picture for you. We didn’t have to think of a video; it just kind of came together.

Even though you’re working in Nashville and working with a country producer, it’s still is hard for “outsiders” to break into country music. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think that this record will be able to help you do that? Do you think it’s still an uphill battle?
Like I said before, country is on their own planet. I feel like breaking into it is something that’s really, really hard. Then you have all the old-school guys that are going to look at a band like us and be like, “Who do they think they are? They can’t come down to Nashville and just write a song and record a record with a country producer and expect them to just walk on all over country radio.” Personally, I’d like to down the road. There’s a couple of songs I think could be cool kind of country-pop crossovers, but that’s me saying that.

I don’t sound like Alan Jackson. I don’t sound like a country singer, so that might be the part where they’re like, “Yeah, the music can be kind of country, but you don’t sound country.” But that’s also the kind of thing that makes our sound a little unique. That’s one kind of instrument that’s cool about our band. If we had someone like Dierks Bentley or someone with a real country voice singing on our record, maybe some of the songs could go on country radio. But because it’s me, I don’t really have that country [voice]—I’m from Boston, I can’t really sing with a Southern drawl. I would personally love to take a song into the Taylor Swift [scenario], but [in the] opposite [way]—she came from country and took over pop radio. I’d like to do the hot AC/pop radio thing, and then if that song does well, see if the country crowd wants to entertain the idea of playing our song. Then maybe we could lead into other songs off the record, like, “Hey, this one is actually a little bit cooler. If you guys liked that one, maybe you’ll like this one” and we’ll try a different one.

I don’t really know how that works. Country music is a whole different ball game, so I think we need to get the pop thing down first and the Hot AC crowd down first, and then we’ll see what happens with the country. But that’s definitely on all of our plates. We want to be able to do that down the road. I don’t think we’re going to be forgetting about that any time soon.

Taylor Swift was exactly who I was thinking of when you were talking about breaking into country—what you guys want to do is the opposite of what she did.
Exactly. The new record is definitely… I could see us opening up for Taylor Swift and playing songs off this new record and have the crowd being, like, “I get it. They kind of sound like a guy band version of Taylor Swift in a way.” But not in the over-the-top Taylor Swift sound, but there’s definitely some songs off there that could lean that way with people listening to Taylor Swift.

Not all people that listen to Taylor Swift like country music. It’s mostly little girls that love Taylor Swift because she writes great songs and because they want to be her. If they could have a group of four boys doing the same thing where they could be like, “Well they’re kind of good-looking boys. I can’t really fantasize Taylor Swift, but I can fantasize these boys right here.” Some of the record has that male version of Taylor Swift to it.

Are there any guest stars on the record?
We wrote this song on the record, and it’s another darker song called “Another Set Of Wings.” It’s a slow song about losing somebody that you’re in love with, or really close to. We wrote that song with a good friend of ours named Steven Barker Liles—he’s in a country band called Love And Theft, and they have a single that’s doing pretty well on country radio right now.

When Justin and I wrote it with him, it was just the three of us in Steven’s bedroom. We were just writing it together, but when we were singing the choruses, I was singing my lead, Justin his high harmony and Steven was singing this middle harmony, and we were like, “That sounds pretty amazing.” We kept doing it over and over again and when we were in the studio, we were like, “Well, it sounded great when we were writing it, why not have Steven just do his middle part?” So Steven came in and recorded his middle harmony in that song. It’s nobody big and famous, but he will be—I guarantee it—because his band is unreal.

On that same song we have this girl named Liz Huett—she’s actually Taylor Swift’s backup singer when she tours, so if you have ever seen a Taylor Swift live video or a tour or a show or anything, she’s the little brunette girl that’s behind Taylor the whole time just singing her backup vocals. She came in and actually sang on the same song.

There’s your country crossover right there! You have two Nashville artists on the album.
Exactly. The few guest stars we do have on the record are country people themselves.

So I guess the big question: Does it have a title, and when is it coming out?
We have a title, but we don’t know for sure—that’s something that might change, so if I say it and then it changes, it might sound stupid. I think we’re still going to sit on the title for a little bit. I think the summer time—that’s what we’re going for. It’s going to have a nice warm feel to it, so what better time to put it out than in the summer? I don’t have an exact month. It was supposed to be early summer, and then I’m hearing late, now I’m hearing middle, so I’m just going to say summer. alt