Post-hardcore/emo stalwarts Thursday are currently on tour with Rise Against, Billy Talent and Circa Survive. The band released their second album on Island records (City by the Light Divided) this year, marking the band's fourth album total and their most varied and powerful effort to date. We caught up with Andrew Everding (keyboards) and Tucker Rule (drums) of Thursday on November 3rd at the Wiltern...

So Guys, how’s the tour been so far?

TR: Pretty good.

AE: It’s been awesome. It’s not a long tour though, it’s only about a month long.

AE: The Austin, Texas show was really, really, really good. It was at Stubb’s BBQ there.

TR: It was an outdoor venue.

AE: We always have really good shows there. We hadn’t played there in a long time. They have good BBQ.

TR: We played the Troubadour for the first time and only time about four years ago.

That was my favorite place to play a show. Because it’s kind of a small place. It’s like really intimate. Just a good setup, and the sound’s good too.

AE: I would want a Doepfer Modular Synthesizer *laughing.* Which is a complete nerd item, but they’re really really expensive. I also wouldn’t mind a 1964 Gretch Hollow

Body.

TR: Yeah. It was pretty much a year straight.

AE: It was a year of writing, and about eight weeks of recording. But yah, working with Fridman was one of my favorite experiences in this band so far. He’s just a really calm, organized person. Most people expect him to be some spaced out genius, like on acid. And he is a genius, but he’s a “family dude.” He just knows his stuff.

TR: He drives a minivan.

AE: I think he has some of the best ears in the recording business.

AE: It’s such a waste of money.

TR: I don’t think that’s fun.

AE: You’re studio costs…let’s say you’re in a studio that’s $1500 bucks a day. That doesn’t make any sense when you can do that at a practice space. The way we did it was we wrote for a year. When we started to feel like we had a record that’s when we started searching out producers.

TR: Our practice space was a studio, and we had a Pro Tools setup. You know how before you were saying, do we learn to play our songs afterwards? We learn to play them beforehand. We had so much time to write it that we tried all these different things. We learned to play them in our practice space with Pro Tools.

AE: We set up a full Pro Tools rig with a Mac keyboard. Which is fine. We had everything miked-up. So we had seventeen live inputs, and we would just hit record whenever we had a song we felt we needed to document. At the end of it we had twelve different versions of songs. We had seventeen songs written for the record. It was a really cool place. We found this place on Hoboken and just turned it into our world.

AE: Absolutely. I’ve been a fan of Fridmann’s since I was like sixteen. I grew up a couple hours from where his studio was. He worked with a local band that I knew of, and that’s how I got into his stuff. He was also in Mercury Rev. Deserter Song is just an insanely good record. But the Flaming Lips stuff is great too.

AE: We realized it was time for us to try a different producer. And we put him on a list with about five other people. We sent out the demos and he was one of the first people to get back to us.

TR: He was definitely on the wish list.

TR: They’re pretty much all true.

AE: Except “The Love song Writer,” that’s more of a fictional short story.

TR: It’s kind of fictional but it’s also about people that write songs like that. It kind of interweaves itself between fiction and nonfiction.

AE: Yeah, I’m a pretty big reader. Right now I’m on a big [Haruki] Murakami kick. I’m been reading tons of that stuff, which is completely addicting. I was an English major in college. Most of my shit was contemporary stuff. For a while I was deep into Faulkner’s stuff. When I’m on the road I want to read more spaced-out, lighthearted stuff.

TR: I just bought Sex, Drugs and Coco puffs [by Chuck Klosterman] I’m like fifteen pages in. I read about a half a page a night.

AE: San Francisco has Mcsweeney’s too, Dave Eggers and all that stuff. Mcsweeney’s quarterly is one of my favorite things.

AE: There’s contents of it in an Octavio Paz poem.

TR: But it’s flopped.

AE: That was Jeff’s influence. He’s a big poetry dude.

AE: There was one band where we had a tiff. For the most part, our scene and everyone we’ve toured with, we’re all really good friends.

TR: I don’t know how you could not get along.

AE: The people that are assholes don’t last too long. It’s a nice-guy business. If you’re not a down-to-earth person and you’re not easy to be around, people are just like “fuck you.”

TR: The people that are assholes are just not cut out to do what we do. If you’re on the road and another band’s on the road, you’re going to wave and say hello.

AE: I grew up in a place that was a for a while the straight edge capitol or the world. A very interesting scene.

TR: My first show was Bouncing Souls. I was into more stuff like Mouthpiece, to Up Front, Youth of Today.

AE: And some post hardcore stuff like Quicksand.

TR: All we used to do during high school on weekends was go to shows, either at the M&M hall, or some sort of basement somewhere, or some weird Elk’s Lodge. That dynamic of, ‘there is no band, there is no stage,’ that’s what made us want to start a band. And now we’re playing places like this, where there’s barricades involved and shit.

TR: Yeah, it’s kind of weird. We have more people now who are watching and judging, rather than people that are participating. Which kind of makes you stressed out, because you have to worry about how you’re playing. It’s like, wow, I can’t really go off at all, because this is an intricate part. We have to play for people in the back of the room, to the side, everything.

AE: The thing about playing in a place like this, is you have to worry about production too. You have to put on a show.

AE: Yeah, it’s awesome. It’s always our goal to reach as many people as possible, without selling out. I don’t have a problem playing big shows.

TR: You take the good with the bad.

AE: There’s still personal reflection on it. War all the Time was definitely about personal politics. There’s tangents of that in this record. But this record has a lot more hope in it than anything else. Whereas War all the Time was a really broad spectrum, as a content record. It crossed so many lines. For CBTLD, we focused it down. Originally, we wanted to do a double album, so that the City by the Light Divided would be split into two parts.

TR: Then we realized that double-albums usually suck.

AE: But in some senses we kept the idea, like in this record there’s an instrumental track in the middle which divides the two sides of it. There’s this distinction between the first half and the second half.

TR: That’s the major difference. I don’t think it’s as dark as War all the Time.

AE: There’s not as much screaming as the past stuff, but with this album we wanted to expand what we could do with our softer stuff, instead of just using the usual stuff for those parts. And then the more heavy stuff, instead of using really chunky guitars, the sound we wanted more was high and piercing.

TR: We added more texture, which kind of took over parts that would be screaming parts. We added different sounds and instruments. We had this whole year to experiment with that shit, and we figured out a lot of stuff. Like, wow, we don’t even need to have a screaming part here, because this keyboard is bugging out, you know?

AE: Fridmann was really keen on the idea of creating atmosphere within songs based on the mood of it. With me he would say things like, can you make this keyboard pad that gets this feeling out of it?” For instance the song “Autumn Leaves,” it’s pretty creepy sounding.

TR: There’s a slide guitar in that song.

TR: we had one song that was about four years old, and it just never worked. We tried and tried. We loved the song, loved what it did, but something was off. Fridmann was like, why don’t you just change the key? We did, and then we were like, wow we have the first song on the record and it’s everybody’s favorite.

AE: A lot of producers will do preproduction for a few weeks before we go in to record. We were like, are we going to do any preproduction? He was like, no, you’re just going to come up here and do the songs. He was really in love with the songs. He thought they were finished pieces. As producer, he did his job by looking at the entire scope of the record, and just placing things in his mind, changing the keys of certain songs and stuff. We usually never did stuff out of the key of D or E. We have shit all over the place in this record.

TR: Our evolution is our evolution. It will always be that way, whether other parties want to get involved or not, it still doesn’t matter.

AE: We’re really starting to realize that a lot of bands will start to get defined by their labels, or the labels by their bands. We’re currently learning that we’re on our own. We can hop from one thing to the next and we’re still going to be moving forward.

TR: we would have never gone to a major label if the label we were on hadn’t left us no other choice.

TR: It got pretty ugly. There was a lot of discrepancies. It left us in a place where either we break up, or we move on.

AE: Every label is ugly though. Unless you’re on a nice little label that does well, like Saddle Creek. But you’re going to fight bigger battles on majors. If you want to get off of a major label you’re screwed.

TR: You’re dealing with astronomical numbers.

AE: We’re talking like millions and millions of dollars, if they want to keep you and you want to go.

AE: We definitely eat. If something’s broken we can fix it. Things are comfortable. I mean, I’m still living out of a plastic bag, but that’s my choice. We’re not driving Mercedes cars or anything though.

TR: I could probably buy the door handle to a Mercedes, but that’s about it.

I notice that a lot of bands are starting up in response to a style that they dislike, a lot of counter-movements as opposed to movements. What do you think Thursday is ‘responding’ to?

AE: I think this is something that’s coming into our generation. I live in Brooklyn, and LA is kind of the same thing. It’s this strange mentality of like hating everything. The response to that stuff isn’t really going to produce anything. I feel myself getting bitter once in a while. Like, “Oh man, all this shit sounds the same.” And in some senses it does, you know, but you have to overcome all that stuff and create new things.

TR: It sucks when you hear kids talking about pop like it’s punk rock. That’s what people know now as punk, pop bands.

AE: Three or four years ago, for bands like us it wasn’t really about selling a million records.

TR: It was about creating something new. People see what’s working, and then they start seventeen-zillion bands, based off that one shred of something that’s working. What pop-hook works, they put it in their songs. Then the next band rips off that band. Towards the end you get Ashlee Simpson.

What is it then that gets you guys really fired up to write?

AE: Most of the songwriting, music comes first. We really concentrate on playing stuff that we really want to. We scrutinize over it. It becomes a problem at certain points, because you cross over the line of creation and critique, and you start doing that at the same time. It can be a real backwards momentum for writing songs. Then once we have stuff, Jeff usually gets inspired enough to write his lyrics. We don’t really have too much input on that end.
As far as what gets us inspired to write: we want to make music with integrity. We want to have longevity as a band, and undergo a constant evolution as musicians. It’s a difficult process. You really start to feel yourself get into a hole sometimes, asking yourself, man, is this catchy enough? That sucks sometimes.

TR: You just kind of want to live in it, you know? That’s what also gets us fired up. We eat, sleep and breathe it. That’s an important way for us to make our art. You have to fucking surround yourself with it.