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Interview: The Stereo's Jamie Woolford on reuniting the band for FBR15

Sure, modern pop-rock pioneers the Stereo might have been dormant for the better part of the last decade, but that doesn’t mean that JAMIE WOOLFORD has been anything less than busy. Our conversation with the Stereo frontman begins with him apologizing for scheduling an interview so early in the morning as he commutes to his Tempe, Arizona, studio, Room Sound. “Honestly, this is the best time to talk to me. I’m kind of like burning the candle at both ends lately and this is like my only alone time,” he admits. Now an accomplished producer (Punchline, the A.K.A.s and the Gin Blossoms are among his recent clients), Woolford took time out of his schedule to talk with SCOTT HEISEL about how the Stereo reconvened for FBR15, what the status is with his other band, Let Go, and the type of innovation it takes to rehearse with a bandmate who is 16 hours away.

First question: The Stereo reunion—that’s pretty awesome. When did that first come to fruition?
I think I was working on the Gene The Werewolf record and I got an email from Adam [Samiljan] at Fueled By Ramen and he was basically like, “Hey, we’re doing this 15-year anniversary concert. Would you and Rory [Phillips, the other half of the Stereo’s original lineup] want to get together and do Three Hundred or whatever?” And I wrote back and I was like, “I will talk to Rory,” and I mentioned it to Rory, and Rory was totally into it. It kind of quickly turned into like, “Wait a minute, what are we going to do? Are we really going to try to play Three Hundred?” and then it just kind of dawned on us that it was going to be probably a fairly mis-executed attempt at trying to redo the record in a type of show that was—how it was laid out to us. So we’re like, “Let’s just do a kind of regular old reunion show kind of thing.” I called Chris [Serafini, bass] and we put it all together. We’re basically just doing as many Three Hundred songs as we can plus several other, we’ll call it “faves,” from the other records.

Chestnuts, if you will.

Yeah, exactly. I don’t dare use the word “hit.” There’s nothing close to a hit.

The crowd pleasers.
The crowd pleasers—yeah, there you go. Honestly, we thought it would be a nice thing, too, since Rory was only on the one record, we actually let Rory pick the entire set.

Oh really?

We kind of gave him the, “Look. If we don’t play ‘New Tokyo [Is Calling],’ we’ll probably get murdered. So, try to pick that one, man.” And he chuckled. Yeah, we said just go at it. The only thing we’ve had a hand in is kind of ordering it—making sure the songs that are hard for me to sing I don’t sing back to back. That kind of stuff.

So basically what you’re saying is if a fan goes to the show and doesn’t like it, it’s not your fault?
[Laughs.] I feel pretty confident in the songs we’ve picked. There’s not enough time to do a full catalog, all the favorites, kind of thing. I mean there are three other bands [on the FBR15 show] and we are very low on the totem pole, and it would be arrogant to sit up there and play forever. It’s cool that we’re reunited but we’re not like, “Fuck you and shit.” It’s not the Beatles. [We’re a] crappy Midwest pop band.

Looking at the all three nights of FBR15, I think that the night you’re on—with Gym Class Heroes, Sublime With Rome and Recover—is the most stylistically diverse night, to put it in the best possible terms. Do you feel like this is the proper place for the Stereo to do a reunion show?
Sure. Dude, the Stereo—it’s really funny to be on the other side. At the time when we were playing around in the Stereo, there wasn’t a tremendous amount of understanding of what the hell we were doing. It’s not like what we were doing was rocket science, but I remember always feeling like we sounded like we were infiltrators of the “scene,” or whatever you want to call it. I always felt like we didn’t quite fit with the bands we were playing with. We sounded too radio or we sounded too this or too that. We didn’t sound punk, we didn’t sound emo, we didn’t sound… you know what I mean? We were always something a little bit off from everybody else, so to be completely honest, this is totally right at home for us. Like, “Okay, sure, let’s play with a hip-hop band and a ska band and a real hardcore band.” That sounds no different than the year 2000 for us.

That’s true; there were many shows I saw you guys at where there was a bizarre lineup of seven or eight bands. I think I saw you guys with the Kills once, which was Alison Mosshart from Discount, and now she is in the Dead Weather.
Yeah, there’s all kinds of—I think it was MACRoCk, we were sandwiched in between Discount and Alkaline Trio, which I’m just like, “We are the weirdest buffer band ever for those two bands.” I mean yeah, they’re all rock bands, they all have guitars, too, whatever. I’ve always had kind of a bizarre—I shouldn’t say bizarre, but a slightly left-of-center perspective of what we actually were. I don’t listen to a ton of bands that sound anything like us, especially these days—I listen to Dolly Parton and Aimee Mann. In comparison to what the kind of music we play, I’ve always listened to very strange music, so bands that would listen to Stereo might think we’re this thing or that thing. I’ve always thought we were kind of like a pop-rock group.

This is the first time you’ve played with Rory in a decade or maybe longer. What was the last show with Rory?
Well the last full show was probably maybe early 2000. The dates game I’m really bad at, but I’d say probably early 2000.

So at this point, at least a decade has passed since you two have played together?
Oh yeah, easily.

People always thought “Oh, there’s bad blood between Jamie and Rory,” because Three Hundred came out and the band only lasted for a few months in that formation. Is there any level of animosity between the two of you at this point, or is that so far past, it’s under the bridge?
You know it’s funny, because I’ve been talking to Rory a bunch lately. We’re getting along so unbelievably well right now, I think we both probably feel a little embarrassed, stupid about the whole thing. I mean, it’s remarkable. Every time we talk it seems to go for at least 45 minutes to an hour and we’re like—it always ends up at some point we start complimenting each other on each other’s music. So it’s kind of funny, it’s this really dumb kind of, “I haven’t seen you in a while. Aren’t we so great?” If you saw it, you might vomit. It’s really nice.

The whole thing right now, the whole Stereo environment—it never felt like this, ever. It always just caked-on drama, and right now it’s like the warmest, most friendly, most positive, most exciting thing that’s happened, especially to the Stereo, in a long time for me. I’m just having a blast; it’s been really fun practicing. Like, I hate to practice, because I just think people don’t practice the way they play a show. Whenever we do a practice, I want to play it like we do it. All the bands I’ve ever been in, it always seemed kind of like a chore, but this has been really, really exciting—and in my opinion, we are sounding already better than we have ever sounded. A lot of that is just the fact that we’re older and better now; we’ve all gotten better over the years. If you’ve stood to do something this long, if you don’t get better at some point, come on.

Our drummer Sam [Hardwig], the guy that’s kind of playing in my solo band, he is drumming for us and he is just so unbelievably fantastic, you have to fight to not sound good playing with a drummer like that. He makes it so easy, and we are sounding—we’ll finish a song and Chris and I will look at each other just like, “I don’t know if that’s ever sounded better. What the hell? Where was this seven years ago?” We’re thrilled; we’re just super-excited.

So are you rehearsing with Rory or just the three of you are rehearsing and then you’ll get together with him later?
We are technically rehearsing with Rory. He is not physically present at our rehearsals. It’s very strange what we’re doing. This idea came up and we’re going to do this [reunion] and it’s like, “Okay, cool.” And then it dawns on you: “How the hell are we going to do it?” It’s not like we’re an operating band that we’re just adding a dude or whatever—everyone needs to kind of go back to the drawing board here. So I kind of created what I call the “pre-production demo,” and once we picked out the songs, I went through and made a Pro-Tools session, and I put everyone’s parts in it—drum machines, fake guitars and crappy vocals. I just took on the musical director mode of it all and said, “Here’s what everyone needs to be doing,” because there was a lot of stuff that’s on the record that isn’t how we play it live exactly, so we needed to factor some of those things in. Getting Sam to learn verbatim the record is a mistake, because we don’t do it that way.

So I sent that to Rory, and he’s about halfway done replacing the parts that I’ve put in there; he’s recording them onto this Pro-Tools session and then he sends the files back and in our practice space we’re feeding his tracks to an amp and to the PA. So we’ll play Three Hundred, and his vocals are coming out of a PA, but it’s all pre-recorded. Essentially, this is the only way we can actually rehearse and work on harmonies with Rory. He’s expecting his first child, him and his wife, in October, and understandably he’s trying to save up all his days off, his vacation time and stuff so when the baby’s born, he can go do that sort of stuff. One of the big stipulations doing the show was that Rory couldn’t come to Phoenix and couldn’t really give a lot of time over to do the rehearsals, so this is our solution to that.

That’s cheaper than a round-trip ticket, I suppose.
The process has an added benefit of—you’re in a practice room, it doesn’t necessarily sound so good in a rehearsal space, especially if there’s a band next door rehearsing across a six-inch wall. There’s all kind of stuff that gets missed. This recording thing has really kind of put under the microscope all the little things that we needed to work out, so it’s actually kind of been better. It’s kind of strange, but Rory seems to be learning the songs very easily this way, and the whole process of getting his guitar parts through an amp has worked flawlessly. It’s cool. It’s both creepy and cool. Like, our drummer didn’t even understand what the hell we were doing until it was finally happening. I was like, “Just trust me.” And once we started hearing Rory come out of the PA the first time we played “Three Hundred,” it was kind of a trip, it was like, “Wow, this is working. We’re doing this.”

Are you viewing this as a final show for the Stereo, or is this the start of a bigger reunion?
I don’t know. Okay, truth be told, I don’t think anybody is super—we’re not going to, like, we’re not “getting the band back together.” You know what I mean? It’s not a permanent reunion or anything like that. No one has any new record plans or anything like that. As soon as Fueled By Ramen announced that we were playing the show within about three hours we had five different offers from five different cities to do reunions there—which is, to be honest, overwhelming. I was like, “Really? People care?” This is nuts, I honestly thought this was just going to be like fun for people at FBR and no one else. So we’ve toyed with the idea of doing this, but like I said, Rory has got Rory Jr. on the way and we’re just trying to—I think what we’re going to try to do is try to get through this show, see where we’re at, and then if there’s still some offers available to come do some other shows afterwards, we’ll kind of just take it like that.

Again, we’re in different cities, people have kids and it’s all kind of like—if somebody comes to the table and says, “Hey, we’d like to offer you this much to do this and we’ll take care of these things,” and we can do it—we’re not trying to line our pockets. The Stereo wasn’t that big; it’s not like we can command some ridiculous fee. But if it makes sense to us, and it doesn’t cost us money to do it, I have a feeling all of us would be happy to go anywhere in the world to play for anyone.

Honestly, it’s more about Rory’s schedule. Rory told me, “If you guys want to go off and do all these shows afterwards without me, I’m totally fine with that.” And I vetoed it. I said, “Look, there’s so much positivity right now around all this stuff. You and I being back together, for a small population of the world—a very small population of the world—this has kind of blown their minds, and I don’t want to pretend that that didn’t matter. So if you’re not going to do it, then I won’t do it.” It’s going to be these four guys or it’s not going to be at all, because it feels so good right now and everybody is getting along so amazingly.

It’s very adult, it’s very smart, it’s very fun and warm and friendly, and I am not interested in having someone having to relearn all these bazillion songs again. Once we get through this process, if we’re going to do anymore, it’s going to be these four people and if there’s no Rory, then there’s no Jamie, there’s no Stereo. I don’t know if that sounds weird or nice or good, but that’s just the fact of it.

You were talking a little bit ago about how the process has been so much more positive now that you’re an adult, everybody is being gracious and courteous. Is that just something that comes with the fact that, at this point, it’s seven to 10 years removed? Or is there something that you’ve changed personally that you feel has directly affected the relationships?
I think it’s all of those things. Everybody’s grown up a bunch, right? Especially me. Shit, look—back in 1999, I don’t even know how old I was, I’m so bad at math, but we treated everything so serious. We just had to have it perfect. I’ve learned over the years that it doesn’t matter how good any of your record is or how good your songs are or whatever the things that you scrutinize over as a young adult trying to be in a band—if you can’t actually make your band work as a unit, it doesn’t matter, you won’t go anywhere. The biggest lesson I learned from being a musician all my life is [if] you can’t make it work with the people, it doesn’t matter how good you are.

I mean, I’ve been very lucky. I fortunately have been able to conjure up some fairly decent music that pushed a little farther than it should’ve, given that the bands I’ve always been in have been so volatile. So it’s kind of outlasted the drama, which I’m so happy about. I still hear from people every week, “I love this Stereo song, this means so much to me,” and that blows my mind, because I feel that way about Descendents songs or Superdrag songs or whatever, and the fact that I have contributed back boggles the mind to me.

There are certainly people in my life that I’ve been involved [with] that I choose to not be involved with anymore; I don’t want them to be a part of my life, and I’m sure they feel the same way. And there are other people like with Rory where, for whatever stupid reason, we couldn’t make it work during the time and now that we’re grown up, we’re getting along probably better than we were in the first place. The world is a funny thing; you have to accept that you don’t get it all the time, and in the moment, you know least of what to do when you’re there—if you just try to act better, be a little bit slower in decision-making, especially when it comes to emotional things, you can make things work better.

At the end of the day, a band has to be a group of friends; if they can’t do that, then the rest of it doesn’t matter because the life expectancy [of a band] is like that of a drunken motorcycle driver. It’s going to happen; you’re going to break up. That’s the only thing guaranteed of any band, is that eventually it will stop. There’s no other guarantee: There’s no guarantee that you’ll get signed, that you‘ll tour, that you’ll play good songs, that you’ll bang supermodels or whatever it is that you’re interested in. The only guarantee that you’ll have is that you’re going to break up.

What is the status right now on your post-Stereo band, Let Go? I know it’s been a couple years since the band have been active and recording.
We haven’t disbanded. We basically just kind of came to the point where—I mean Phoenix is a kind of weird place, right? So when we play—it’s funny, I bet if Let Go played in, like, Chicago, we’d probably do okay, but in Phoenix, people are just not interested. And everybody is so busy with other things; Scott [Hessel, drums] is in two other bands, Chris has been in other bands, I’m in the studio pretty much everyday all day long and that just seems more important to us than to go and play these songs [to people who] don’t care.

So we’re just kind of like, “Well, we’ll just do things when it’s good to do it.” So we’ll play maybe two or three times a year and more frequently if it’s fun. If the one before was fun, we’ll book another one soon. But it’s like, there’s no official, “We’re doing this or we’re not doing this,” it’s just kind of like we’ll probably stay together in this type of situation indefinitely. When someone wants us to play something and it sounds like it’s going to be fun, we’ll do it. But no one is barking down our door or anything like that.

At this point in my life, I’m 36, I’m not signed to any label for the first time since I’ve been 21—not like my record deals are iron-clad or anything, but, like, I don’t owe anybody anything. All I have to do is just enjoy this. There’s so much of my life that’s been so difficult to enjoy music because there’s always touring, working and drama and whatever and SoundScan forms and fuck—stuff I just don’t care about. Arguing about who plays what time? I don’t care about that. I only want to enjoy music at this part of my life. Anything else, I treat as a dagger to my face. Get it away, I don’t want that. alt

(The Stereo will be playing on September 8 at Terminal 5 with Recover, Gym Class Heroes and Sublime With Rome, as part of Fueled By Ramen's 15th birthday celebration. More info on the night can be found at fueledbyramen15.com.)