Sparta recently released their third full length on their third label, aptly titled Threes. The band is touring this winter with one LA date at the Avalon featuring Sound Team and As Tall As Lions. We sat down with bassist Matt Miller to discuss the ups and downs of touring, recording, and luck in general.
So how is the tour going so far?
It’s going great. This is surprisingly enough one of the most enjoyable tours I’ve been on so far. Just a total good time, and also a very empowering time for us right now.
On the same note, are there any bands that you’ve toured with where you had a particularly intense bonding situation?
The first band, that we took on the first leg of the tour, Lola Ray, we got on really with them; really good people. But for the most part, everyone we tour with we end up becoming friends with and hang out with them again.
Is there anyone you’d like to tour with again, or maybe an ideal band you’d like to tour with if you haven’t already?
Queens of the Stone Age...we did a bunch of European festivals and dates in Europe back in 2004 and that was really cool, they’re great guys.
Getting to the album, was there any connection with the title Threes to the saying that deaths come in threes or good things come in threes?
It’s something that Jim noticed,aside from the facts that were obvious that it’s our third album, third record label. Good and bad things come in threes, I certainly have that luck. I’ve gotten three tickets in the past two months. Seriously, it’s been like six or seven years since I’ve had a ticket.
Was there a particular song on Threes that was your pet song, one that you really connected with?
It was translations for me. That was a song that went through several incarnations, and towards the end… we had a list of almost thirty songs that were complete, lyrics and music, and that’s one that had the least amounts of votes for keeping. I actually threatened to fight people for it, so then we kept it.
There was a great span of time between Porcelain and Threes, and obviously a change in the lineup: how did this affect the sound of Threes?
During part of the writing, because it was done in three or four blocks, and the first part we were in a really dark space, a bad area mentally. The first song we completed was “Crawl,” and I think that was a heavy dark song, and the idea that we had for the tones and sounds were like what it was going to be. And also when Keeley came into the band, he brought like another sense of atmosphere, and at the same time a lot of hope for us.
Which one of the songs or few songs do you think indicate the direction you are going to further mature into?
We were talking about this the other day, and I think songs like “Unstitch your mouth” and “Red.Right.Return.” and even “Erased Again” those are the songs we really felt passionate about, those are the direction that we might go. Before when we did Porcelain, one of the songs that we thought that was fuckin’ awesome, like the direction we might go was “Guns”, and that’s a really heavy song. We kind of went the different direction.
With the streaming of your entire album on Myspace, and also tips on where to buy the album for the cheapest, is that any indication of your appreciation of your fans?
I think fans of any band in general will get the music however they want it, whether it’s buying it, downloading it, ripping it or whatnot. If you put every available format out there, let them be empowered to do their own choosing; you can’t control what the hell they’re going to get, especially since everything gets leaked; our album got leaked a month and a half before release. Can’t do anything about it.
Do you ever look yourselves up on Youtube?
No, no, I’m too embarrassed.
You know you’re on there though, right?
I’m sure people have recorded us on phones and such. The only thing I once did was, someone told me I should Google myself, and the funniest thing is that there’s a baseball journalist with my name.
You were involved with a 16 minute short, Eme Nakia; what was the process behind bringing that to fruition from just a good idea?
How it started was, before we even thought we were going to do another record, because we were in such a bad space, Tony called Jim and I and said ‘I’ve got an idea before we do another album’ which we hadn’t even talked about, ‘we should try putting a short film or long video along with it.’ Jim came up with an idea about Tony’s life, because he had a pretty crazy childhood. From that point on it took almost the exact same time from the beginning of writing the album to the end as it took from the beginning of writing the script and screenplay for it to the actual finished product; it was a year. It started out with Tony and his cousin who’s a screenwriter, trying to put something together, and eventually meeting up with Joe Renteria and Chris Holmes and it snowballed from there.
Let’s talk about your first single, taking back control.
It’s probably our hardest song on the record. That was another one that took several, several revisions and rewrites. And the chorus of the song was changed while we were recording in the studio and mixing the rest of the record. At the same time, it was strange, we had part of the record mixed somewhere else, we’re mixing another part over here, and Jim was in another studio redoing the chorus. So at one point we were at three different studios, trying to see what was going on, it was pretty hectic. I think that song pretty much sums up, aside from the obvious political leanings, it sums up our attitude of being really hardworking, hard-driving people that really want to push things for ourselves, push it.
How has the switch been to Hollywood Records?
Oh it’s been great. When you decide you want to leave a label, it’s pretty much like saying you want to become homeless. It’s like floating. Going from our situation with Geffen, where we were kind of thrown in their laps and they didn’t know what to do with us, they didn’t know what to do with anything. Then, going to a label that was actually pursuing us; they love us as a band, they love us as people, and it’s the smallest of the majors. There are only twenty or thirty people working there; we’ve made really close friends with the people working there so.
Has it eased the creative process?
Yeah, wide open, wide open. I think Hollywood will back us no matter what.
Back to the tour, what is your favorite venue to play?
There was a place that we played in London, Ontario, Call the Office. It’s a small freakin’ club. It’s pretty much a bar club, and when we showed up we were like, this is going to be an interesting one. We started looking around at all the pictures that were thrown up around the place. Radiohead played there, Morphine, The Cure when they were starting out. It was totally historic. We started realizing what an honor it was to play there, and we had probably one of the best shows of the tour.
What is the best city to play in, just to be in that city?
Chicago. Absolutely that city. Even though it’s cold as shit there in the winter, I could live there in a second.
What about in Los Angeles, favorite place to play?The troubadour, it’s like our second home. Every time we play there, it’s almost magical in its own right. I mean, amazing, completely different experience.
What are you personally listening to right now?
It’s kind of all over the place. P.J. Harvey, Morphine, This band called The Life and Times; amazing band. Then some of this new instrumental metal like Red Sparrows, Russian Circles, Pelican, a little bit of Mastodon, and then The Cure. I’m a huge Cure freak.
What are some of the downsides of touring?
I think the downside is the whole hurry-up and waiting game, where you’re going city to city and when you get there you unload, and you wait, you set up and you wait, and then you wait for the rest of the evening until you start the show. You have to be creative to do things to keep yourself busy. There are only so many books you can read, there are only so many CDs you can listen to. That’s a little bit of a bummer for me.
Have you read any good books lately?
I read a pretty cool book called lords of chaos, and it’s about the whole late eighties, mid nineties black metal scene in Scandinavia, pretty awesome. I just got enthralled with it. That’s what got me listening to the instrumental metal. The translation from Scandinavian to English was a little rough.
How do you know when the honeymoon for an album is over and its time to start concentrating on something new?
That’s an interesting question. This album was weird because we’ve taken so much time with it. I think for me the honeymoon ended when we finished mastering, and I was like, alright that parts done, let’s actually work this, let’s take it on tour. For me that’s the end of the honeymoon, because at that time I was completely obsessed with every little part of it, I think we all were, and I think that’s the honeymoon of it.
What are your top three influences?
A major influence that we’ve never realized is the water. The water and the weather. Because we’ve been recording all our records for some reason by ports, and we realized what a weird mood that puts on everything. Two: the punk rock ethic. We’re very guilty for a lot of stuff, but at the same time we’re still willing to work our asses off, not take shit from anyone, do whatever we want to do. And three, I’ll make that easy: Radiohead, because all of us in the band are just huge fans.
What do you consider the top three albums of all time?
The Beatles Rubber Soul, Fugazi’s 13 songs, U2’s Joshua Tree.
Has your favorite instrument ever been trashed?
No, I’ve been lucky with that. I might be rough on my gear, but I absolutely adore it. I get really excited when I get to set it up and look at it and play it.
What has been your craziest night performing?
We’ve had some really wild ones, and it always involves drinking and whatnot. I think we’ve had some shows where the aggression onstage is so overwhelming, we’re on the verge of destroying, of imploding because of something happening earlier that night, and I think everyone is on the same page and it’s like a hammer waiting to smash.
What has been your most hardcore fan experience?
We’ve had two. There’s a guy that we know, a fan. He kind of follows us around from certain cities to cities. Tony was giving a friend a relative’s number, and this guy was behind him writing the number down. But we caught him on that, threw it away and he freaked out, I think he cried. Then there was this girl in Australia who asked us to sign her leg, and we were like, ‘alright, but why?’ And she had a certain spot, then we started noticing that she had a bunch of tattoos of the song titles from Porcelain and Wiretap, and that she wanted to get our autographs tattooed on her leg. That was pretty crazy, kind of freaky. It’s weird though, because you can’t say no.
What is your favorite LA hangout spot?
I like hanging out at Griffith Park. Night life... I just hangout in hole-in-the-wall bars, I’m not a club dude.
Do you have any good random touring stories?
We’ve had a bunch of goofy stuff that happens that you wish you could catch on tape so that people would believe it. We’ve had so many crazy ass experiences on this tour, and I can’t think of one. Actually, the craziest thing on this tour is the amount of driving we’ve been doing, and we’re doing it in a van and trailer. And I’ve somehow regulated myself where I can operate on four hours of sleep, its weird. I may look like I’m partially crazy, I think we’re all getting a little weird.
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