TheNewTrust-Sep12-620

Interview: The New Trust’s Josh Staples on dreaming, Steve Albini and punk-rock pooches

While it’s been four years since THE NEW TRUST put out their last studio full-length, Get Vulnerable, vocalist/bassist JOSH STAPLES has been anything but resting on his laurels. In that time, he’s recorded and toured with the Jealous Sound, regrouped with his original band the Velvet Teen and even recorded and released an acoustic TNT album with some friends. Now, the Santa Rosa, California-based indie-punk band have booked their first U.S. tour in quite some time, which will take them out to Chicago where they’ll record their new record, Keep Dreaming, with legendary engineer Steve Albini. We checked in with Staples to get more details.

INTERVIEW: Scott Heisel

It’s kind of odd to announce the impending recording of an album that already has a title and everything, isn’t it?
Well, to talk about an album that hasn’t been recorded yet is one of those things, like, who knows what’s going to happen? It could turn out to be a piece of shit, but I’m confident that if everything goes well and we all arrive in Chicago safely and we rehearse the songs 21 days in a row on this tour, it should go fine. It should be good.

Are you playing the new record start-to-finish on your upcoming tour, or are you just kind of working the songs in throughout?
We’re going to try to play as many of the songs as we can every night, and we do play some old songs too, but it’s probably going to be about half-and-half. At least that’s our plan, and it’s just the three of us, as it has been for the last, essentially, three [or] four years. Me and Sara [Sanger, guitar] and Julia [Lancer, drums]. The old songs we play are the ones that translate well to a single guitar, opposed to the crazier ones that have too many guitars, in my opinion. But yeah, we’re going to be playing every single night on the way out there, which is something I’ve never done before. We’re literally playing every single night. There’s no nights off.

Are you concerned you’re going to enter the studio and not be at your best vocally?
The opposite, in my opinion. I mean, I’ve never done this before, but I’ve always talked about it. To tour out to do a record seems to be the ideal way to do it because if you play all the songs—like, [for] every other record I’ve ever done, either the Velvet Teen or the New Trust, we’ve recorded and then you go on tour, and then by the time you get back from tour the songs sound way better than the record. Ideally, you’re playing every night, so you’re just getting better every night. So I’ve always wanted to tour out to do a record and haven’t yet in my lifetime, so that’s kind of a big deal, I think, for us, and I think it will be a clincher to make these songs the best that they can be. Vocally, I mean, I can never tell. I don’t know. I’m very haphazard with vocals. I have no training regime. I have no drinks I take before or after. I just kind of wing it and cross my fingers I don’t blow it out.

You’re recording with Steve Albini, and he’s very vocal in saying that he’s not a producer; he’s very much an engineer. He’ll get sounds and he lets the band do their thing. So, going into this, what are you expecting to get out of working with Steve? He’s not the guy that’s in there telling you to do take after take after take. He’s going to say, “Do you like it?”
Exactly, and that’s exactly what we want. We don’t want anybody to tell us what sounds good. Essentially, I’ll be producing the record and Steve will be engineering it. That’s how we’re imaging it because all of us will be the judge of whether our takes are good enough and whether we like them or not, so the New Trust will be essentially producing the record and Albini will be recording it because we don’t really want anyone to tell us how the songs are going to be better. We’ve been working on [these songs] for a long time, and we’re pretty sure they’re pretty good, and we’ve been laboring over them and changing them over and over again… We appreciate the fact that he’s an engineer, not a producer, and he makes the best sounding records that I can even imagine. He’s made so many of our favorite records, and to get that treatment with our music is, firstly, really intimidating and nerve wracking to be in the same room. But at the same time, he does what he does and he never listens to demos, he doesn’t pick his projects, it’s very much work for him, and that’s what we really like.

So has he heard your band at all this point, or will the first time he hear your band is when you guys show up to the studio?
It’s exactly that. In fact, if you go to their website, it tells you that they don’t want demos about what your band’s going to be like. They don’t want to know. He’s going to set up the things he sets up. We’ll describe what we do for him, and we’re a three-piece rock band and we want the drums to sound gigantic and we want everything to sound the best it can—I mean, he’s the only guy in the world that’s been able to replicate the Zeppelin drum sound, and he’s done so for Page and Plant themselves, so that’s a huge deal. He’s the best at what he does, and I’ve always thought a band are as good as what their drums sound like, so that’s kind of what we’re going for.

It’s been four years since Get Vulnerable came out. Do any of these songs date back that far?
Two of the songs on the record are songs that we had around Get Vulnerable time, but we just left them off because we felt Get Vulnerable was… To add anything would have made the record different and we’re really happy with that record, all three of us, so to have changed it or add anything that wasn’t 100 percent written and done would have imbalanced it. I think it’s good from beginning to end, in my opinion. That’s one of my favorite things I’ve done, so we left a couple of those off. Kept them for the new record, and the new record ended up being longer down the road than we imagined, so we’re not the quickest writers anymore these days. We’ve written a bunch of songs and we’ve kind of scrapped the majority of them. We’ve written albums worth of songs and let them go to seed, and then we came up with new ones.

As the primary lyricist and vocalist in the band, what’s that process like to write all of those songs and then say these aren’t good enough and you’re throwing away all of these ideas that aren’t just musical ideas, but also lyrical ideas? Do you end up kind of cannibalizing those songs down the line for other songs, or are you just abandoning those thoughts entirely?
I’m keeping them on the back burner. We had an album’s worth of songs and we didn’t know how we were going to record them and we had a couple people in mind around here that we would have liked to work with, but then we got really ambitious and decided [to record in] Chicago at Electrical Audio, and we realized maybe we should kind of, like… A lot of the songs we had written were piano songs, and we had just done an acoustic record and we realized we don’t want to be known for having soft records, and we decided a lot of the piano songs, a lot of the mellower songs, we just kind of put aside, and then a couple songs that are a little more straightforward like those New Trust pop-punk songs we occasionally write, we kind of put those aside as well. I don’t really write enough songs to ditch any. I can’t afford to ditch any, so we always keep them in the back of our head.

I view you as a very honest lyricist. I think you’re very to the point. Look at “Holy Wars,” “Get Vunerable,” “Song For Ben Henning”—these are tracks that are very specific in what they’re saying, and I don’t feel like you spend a lot of time mixing metaphors. I’m personally curious as to what it is you’re mining for this record.
Well a lot of this lyrical content on this next record is not very uplifting. I like to think that the songs are uplifting in a lot of ways, and of course to get these thoughts out are cathartic for me and it’s very, very helpful for me to move on and be positive, but a lot of the songs are about death. A lot of the songs are about a lot of friends of mine who have died. One of the songs is about a friend of mine who was a [military veteran]. He was one of the biggest New Trust fans I know, and he would travel out to see us in all the western states, but he died because he just couldn’t handle being in what was essentially constant pain since he got home from being a vet. Like just chronic pain, and he just eventually couldn’t take it, so he didn’t. He didn’t carry on. So there are songs that are about politics in that way. That are about how the U.S. treats its vets, and I’m completely anti-war, completely anti-military, but, of course, you have to sympathize with people who aren’t and have to deal with that when they get home.

It’s such a traumatic experience for a person who’s left alive to lose somebody and then there’s a process where you just dream and dream and dream about these people and eventually that’s where they live on. You continue to see them and talk to them and work out your mental problems about death and friendship in your mind and in these episodes of your dreams. That’s partially why the record is called Keep Dreaming. I don’t know what it is about this town. So many people die in this town. It’s crazy, and maybe it’s the same everywhere, but it seems like more so here in the town we work in and maybe the age that we are. So a lot of the Keep Dreaming stuff is about that. It’s about the people we lose and where they live on, and then there’s other things about melodies that come in dreams and that kind of stuff and constantly thinking of stuff and writing stuff down. Some of my favorite songs I’ve done have come from melodies that I’ve woken up with. Like “The Suffering Of Fools” is a melody I woke up with, off Get Vunerable, and there’s a couple other ones that are melodies that literally I just wake up with then stumble to a recording device and put them down, and then forget them and find them again.

That’s very much like how Keith Richards wrote “Satisfaction.” I’m curious, though: You didn’t really do much as a band last year, but now you’re booking a full tour with a recording session in the middle of it. Does that kind of tie into the whole “keep dreaming” aspect of going after that rock ’n’ roll dream, or is that a little too on the nose?
When we had our last record, it was called the New Trust Get Vulnerable. It is a sentence, and yet the band name and the album title is a sentence. I like that. I think that was kind of interesting like Elvis Costello And The Attractions Get Happy, that kind of thing, and I think the New Trust Keep Dreaming is another funny sentence in that way. It’s true. We’re constantly just coming up with ideas, whether they’re ever used or not, there are always fresh ideas. I think that’s one of the best things about being in a band. You get to theorize all these plans, and if you get 10 percent of them done, then you’re stoked. And it is a funny play on that for us.

A lot of the things about [the past few years], I was just really busy with doing the Jealous Sound thing, writing Velvet Teen stuff and doing a couple Velvet Teen tours, so I was busy with other things. All of us are constantly, career-wise, art driven. Doing anything that’s in the art world, and I do consider music definitely an art form for sure. A lot of people kind of in the art world don’t, especially rock music, but I think it’s frivolosity and it’s dreaminess and it’s loftiness and it’s big plans and trying to get as many of those big plans done as you can without burning yourself out, and that is a play on that, that phrase. “The New Trust keep dreaming” is definitely a play on that phrase.

When the New Trust did that acoustic tour last year, you took your dogs with you. I thought that was really interesting—you don’t see a lot of traveling animals in bands. Was that difficult at all?
It was not difficult—we just want to keep an eye on them and we want to have them with us because they’re parts of our family, so we’re bringing two dogs on this tour as well. We’ll have Julia’s dog Stella and our dog Murray with us, and it’s nice because we get to go experience the dog parks of every city. We think about it a lot and the dogs are fine in the car in most spots, so we can leave them while we play and people enjoy hanging out with them. It’s just fun. It’s really fun. I mean, shit, I love bringing dogs on tour. It’s really fun. A lot of dogs seem more punk than some of my friends. They love it. They get to smell different places and they get to see different landscapes. It gives you something to do.

Is Electrical Audio dog friendly?
They are! Well, they have studio cats, but they also have apartments they can put the cats away in when the dogs are around, but I think it’s going to be really good for us. It’s going to make us walk around. It’s going to make us see parts of the city we wouldn’t normally see. It’s going to be a nice distraction from boring spots either in the trip or in the van or in the studio even. I think it’s going to be helpful.

I would be remiss if I didn’t ask one last question before I let you go regarding the Velvet Teen. I know you guys talked about working on a new record with Steve Choi and Roger Camero producing. Is that still in the works?
It’s nearly done. We spent the last few weeks in the Tehachapi Mountains at the studio Bright Mountain that they have up there that Roger has built up there with Joe from the Warriors. They built a studio in the mountains at Joe’s house, and it’s absolutely gorgeous. It has a 180-degree view of the mountains and Bakersfield in the distance, and it’s really cool. We did a lot of the drum tracking and bass tracking there, and then went to Santa Ana and finished up the guitars and vocals and bass down there. We’re just doing some stuff with the guitars and keyboards and finishing up some vocal stuff, and it’s essentially done, and they’re going to be mixing it over the next few weeks. It’s 11 songs, maybe 12 songs. I’m super-happy with it. I think it sounds great.

You self-released both the last EP the Velvet Teen put out, No Star, and the last New Trust record. Is that still the plan for both the bands at this point, to self-release your music digitally and make a limited physical artifact for people to buy if they want it, or are you looking at trying to pitch yourself to more record labels?
Well we’ll do what we can to see if a label is interested, but we’re not going to push it so hard that we delay its release. We know that we can put out our own record, and we have friends that might put it out too. We’re going to give it to people that are interested and have been expressing interest, and if they bite, that’s great. We’d love to have that taken off of our plate, have the distribution handled with somebody else. Worst-case scenario is not a bad case at all. It means we get to put it out ourselves and we get to spend time doing shipping. Either way, it’s coming out, but we’ll probably try to find some sort of label that we like and want to work with.

So then, in your dream world, when do you want the next New Trust record to come out? If you could pick a release date, when would it be?
Well, it depends. I’m going to go ahead and say that we’ve learned over the years to not book a release date until you have the record in your hands because you will not have records at your record-release show if you do that. But I’m thinking at the very latest it will come out in the spring of next year, but depending on how we decided to do it, we might try to get it done by the end of the year as well for the New Trust record. The good thing about recording in a spot like Electrical Audio with Steve is that you leave with a record. It’s not like you’re going to go ahead and add a little bit of stuff to the two-inch tape. The mix is done and no one can do it better than he can do it, so it’s as good as it’s going to get when you leave, and I love that idea. There’s not extended tracking and there’s not extra stuff and remixing and stuff. It’s done when you leave, and that’s something I really miss about the ’90s. The good thing about the Velvet Teen record and the New Trust record is that we haven’t got a record label telling us when we’re done. The process of the Velvet Teen record will probably take a bit longer than the process of the New Trust, but we haven’t got labels telling us that the music needs to be done at a certain time, and it’s a stress-free environment in both cases. I love the idea of walking away with a record, for better or for worse, and moving on to the next thing.

One final question, regarding this upcoming tour: If someone were to bring Murray and Stella treats, what do they like the most?
Well, Murray suffers pancreatitis, which means he can’t have too much food that we don’t regulate because it doesn’t sit well with his stomach, so don’t bring Murray any treats. If you’re going to bring him anything, he likes Greenies, but those are expensive. They’re the vegetable-based, teeth-cleaning treats. He likes very simple dog biscuits. Stella will eat just about anything and Julia will feed her just about anything, so anything goes pretty much with Stella.

So we’ll see some doggie dumpster diving? Is that what we’re going for?
Yeah, maybe. alt