Miguel Mendez

(October 2005)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

Designed for optimal kickback time, Miguel Mendez's My Girlfriend Is Melting is a laidback combination of experimental avant-folk and stoner rock.  Mendez is a longtime friend of Joel Morales and Dios [he penned "You Got Me All Wrong," which is included on Girlfriend after being previously covered by Dios on their self-titled record], and they draw from some of the same classic Californian influences.  Mendez has an adventurous streak as a songwriter, but it doesn't derail the album's cohesion. 

Chatting from his adopted home of NYC, the one-man show gives the lowdown on growing up across from a crackhouse in Long Beach, having his horizons widened by Beck, and already having a song land on The OC.  He also corrects a misleading bio and explains what it's like to watch something melt for the first time.

What’s the street date for the new one?

Tuesday, October 11th.

Well, happy release.

Thanks, man.  We’re having a party you should come to.  I don’t know where you live, though.

Venice Beach.

Oh, really?  I live in New York City.

(laughs)  Ah.  But you’re from out here, right?  Long Beach?

Yeah, I am from Long Beach, but I haven’t lived in California for a long time.

Why did you leave?

I visited New York City once when I was pretty young, 13 or 14, and it was Fourth of July and I walked into Central Park and Sonic Youth was playing for free.  I was like, “Dude, I’m moving to this place sooner or later.  This place is cool.”

There isn’t that much biographical information on you out there, and it’s mostly the same stuff over and over.  So I wanted to step through your bio a little bit.

Okay.  The bio is sort of interesting.  I mean, it’s sort of bad.  (laughs)

Everyone talks about the fact that you went to the same high school as Snoop.

Yeah, I went to the same high school as Snoop Dogg.

So that is rough territory, right?  Snoop isn’t posing?

No.  It’s definitely not the way it was—now it’s a weird neighborhood, but back then it was pretty fucked up.  He’s not really posing at all.  I grew up across the street from a crackhouse.  There were gangs, but I’d say the most depressing thing about it was that there was such a big drug problem.  But it was alright – I had fun.  (laughs)  That high school was kind of crazy.  There were like 4,000 students who went there.  But [Snoop and I] didn’t ever go there at the same time, but we did go to the same high school, grew up in the same neighborhood.

And then from there it was on to Berkeley?

Yeah, I went to Berkeley for awhile.

What led you to bailing out from there?

Oh, I didn’t bail out on it, actually.  That’s one of the things that’s false inthe bio.  I actually graduated.  I just didn’t end up graduating with a degree in physics like I started doing.

I guess “college dropout” is more rock-and-roll.

Yeah, every statement in that bio is a sort of weird half-truth.

I’m glad we’re doing this, then.  We can clear it up.

(laughs)  I can’t wait to set the record straight.

And you wound up writing a novel.  What was that about?

It’s pretty weird.  A lot of it is about making music.  I don’t really like it.  I never really had plans to do anything about it.  Maybe one of these days I’ll try to write again.  I finished it, but not satisfactorily.  I’m pretty sure that eventually I will write another book, but it’s something I want to do right.

One more bio question:  it says that after all of this stuff happens—you go to Berkeley, you write a book—you started writing music.  So you came into it kind of late?

Well, no, that’s also false.  I’ve been making music for a really long time.  I guess it’s true enough that I didn’t really take myself seriously as a musician until a long time afterwards, but I’d always been fucking around and doing stuff.  It was something I did for fun, and probably a few years ago was when I decided that I wanted to start trying to make my own records.  It took me a few tries to make one that I actually liked.  After that, I kept on making ‘em, and then it took me a few tries after that to get someone to pay attention.  But after all that work, I still don’t think I’m close to doing the things I want to try.  There are still a bunch of records I have to make.

Who’s the first band or songwriter you really got into as a fan, then?

When I was a little kid, I really liked the band War.  (chuckles)  That’s the kind of music I was into when I was a kid.  I was into War and The Midnighters and Kool & The Gang.  I guess when I started to write music, all the early stuff that Beck did changed the way I thought things could be done.  When I first heard Beck, I thought, “Oh, yeah, there’s a shitload of weird things you can do!”

My Girlfriend is Melting has a number of optimal chill-out songs.  Who do you put on the stereo when you need to unwind?

Oh, I don’t know.  I’m definitely somebody who’s a bit of a monomaniac.  I don’t really own a ton of records.  Lately, I think Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young are what I put on when I’m just around and doing anything.  But I don’t really own a lot of records; I listen to stuff my friends make, and then I have maybe 20 records that I listen to.  I’m not a collector like a lot of my friends.  I don’t have an iPod.  (laughs)

The title of the record feels a tad drug-influenced.  True or false?

Yeah, it’s pretty drug-influenced.  But it’s also just sort of about love, you know?  It is about somebody specific.  The whole thing—one time when I was on acid, and the first time I ever saw something melt, it was really beautiful but it also scared the shit out of me.  That’s sort of the idea.

This was pretty much a one-man show.  You did the production and engineering and everything.

Yeah, I did everything myself.  On the liner notes of the record when it comes out, it says all the exceptions, but there were basically only two songs where I had people helping me out and playing instruments.

Does that make it more daunting to take it out on the road?  Are you going to strip the songs down, or are you bringing people out with you?

I do it a lot of different ways.  I had a band with two other people.  I still do it by myself a lot.  I also have another band that’s more of a full-on rock and roll band.  I think it’s a nice opportunity when you’re playing songs live to do whatever the fuck you want.  I’m really bad at remembering the lyrics to my songs, so I’ll just start to make them up.  I feel like that’s alright, that’s allowed.  When you’re live, the only responsibility you have to the audience, I think, is to do something that’s good.  I don’t think I’m ever going to settle one sort of specific live show.

The one that I’m excited about right now, though, is my friend Andy is playing drums with me, my friend Robby is playing keyboards and my friend Scotty is playing bass.  We’re trying our hardest to be as much of a party band as possible.  All those guys are so sick at what they do; it’s like playing with a bunch of Nashville dudes where I count to four and the whole thing starts going by itself and I have to try to keep up with them.

It struck me that some people will probably think you’re doing a cover when you do “You Got Me All Wrong.”  Had you always planned on doing that song yourself, too?

Yeah, I always did.  The thing about Dios is that those guys have been super old friends of mine for a long ass time.  Me and Joel [Morales] have written tons of songs together, we’ve been in bands together…we’re just really, really, really old bros.  When he was going to put out the record, he was like, “Hey, man, can I do one of your songs?”  I was like, “Yeah, do as many of them as you fucking want.”  [“You Got Me All Wrong”] was the one he chose because, at the time, that was the one he was really stoked about.  Probably at the time, that was one that I’d just written, a new one.  They got into it and I love the version they did of it.  It was on The O.C. (laughs)

Joel has tons of versions of my songs.  Joel is such a fucking amazing dude.  He’ll sit around when he’s bored and he’ll just do a version of my song.  Then he’ll show it to me, and I’ll be like, “Oh my God, Joel, I didn’t even know that song was good.”

The opening two tracks are two of the most up-tempo on the album, and then the tempo picks up again toward the end with “Fond Memories.”  How much time do you spend on putting the tracks in sequence?  Is that a deliberate process, or do the chips fall where they fall? 

The one thing that I wanted to do, because I always do this when I make a record in case it’s put out on vinyl, is think of it in terms of sides.  This record is getting put out on vinyl, which I’m really stoked about.  There is a Side A and a Side B, so there is thought put into it for that way.  I did have a map.  For instance, the song at the end, that weird little thing—I knew I wanted something that sounded like that at the end, but I didn’t know what it was going to be.

“Jenny’s Jam” – what’s the origin of that one?

Well, I was hanging out with my friend Jenny.  We were hanging out a subway station waiting for a train to come.  She started singing this song, and I just happened to have my tape recorder with me.  I don’t even know if she knew I was taping because I was being sort of sly about it.  I went home and came up with a beat, started fucking around with it a little bit, and it just happened by accident.  It was more of a project than a song.  It’s sort of just a joke, just one of those things where you have a friend who does something cool and you want to be like, “Hey, check out how cool you are.”