Neon Blonde
A conversation with Johnny Whitney
(November 2005)
Interview by Adam McKibbin
The Blood Brothers are polarizing. Ask a group of people what they think of the band and you likely won’t hear a single “Ehh, they’re alright.” Pitchfork says they’re jaw-dropping devourers of illusion. Vice says they’re an “abortion of a band.” Well, BB’ers Johnny Whitney and Mark Gajadhar have a new musical incarnation and while Neon Blonde's eclectic Chandeliers in the Savannah wages a less abrasive aural assault on listeners, it’s still a unique beast that should earn plenty of love, a little bit of hate, and not a lot in between.
When did Neon Blonde begin? When did you start writing these songs?
I started writing them about August of 2004. I wasn’t, at the time, writing for a project, specifically. We had quite a bit of time off in the Blood Brothers, like a month and a half, and I just started coming up with some material. We weren’t trying to write a record in Blood Brothers at the time, so the idea just came to me to try to do something myself and see if I could do it, basically.
When did it start to gel in your mind, then, that this would really be a separate batch of songs and a separate band?
Probably a couple months later, about fall of 2004. Dim Mak agreed to put it out, and after that, I was writing for something, so it was a lot easier. It was really about five months between when I had the idea to do the record and when we recorded the record. It all happened pretty fast.
You’d obviously had a successful few years leading up to that, and the Blood Brothers had toured a lot, but were you still nervous taking these songs in front of an audience?
Oh, yeah, horribly. It was really terrifying. I’m not doing it anymore, but for those first four shows, I played guitar—which I’ve never really played in front of people. That was really scary. I had a hard time with that.
Do you get the sense that there is a lot of overlap in the fan bases of the two bands?
Yeah, I do.
Was that a worry, too, in those early days? That they’d come in expecting something a little closer to the Blood Brothers?
It was a little bit at first, but I made a conscious effort to not pay attention to what people say on the Internet and all that. It’s hard because we haven’t really been able to play shows or tour with it. One of the things that me and Mark have talked about is playing with bands outside of the Blood Brothers genre, to try to branch out from the hardcore fan base—not that we don’t want those people, but we both feel that there’s a lot of potential with this band to go beyond what the Blood Brothers fan base has been.
It’s interesting with the Blood Brothers, too, because with every record that they’ve ever done, it’s like immediately half the people that liked us before don’t like us anymore. With Burn Piano Island, Burn!, I remember hearing all this shit talk about that record not being as good as the one that came before it. When Crimes came out, it was the same thing. If you really pay attention to it, it makes your mind go crazy.
Absolutely. But how do you balance that? You obviously don’t want to lose touch with the fan base, either.
Well, I think that it’s just important…obviously, you’re writing for an audience, or else you’d just be hanging out in your basement making noise. But I think it’s important to find that balance between what people want you to do and what you want to do. If you spend too much time in either category, you end up extremely generic or extremely outlandish.
What’s going on with the Blood Brothers now? With a band like that, I would think it would be pretty all-consuming once the ball is rolling with recording and touring.
Yeah, we’re kind of in a transition right now. We just got home from tour about five days ago, and we don’t have a practice space and we don’t even have our equipment—it’s being shipped home. We have plans to write and record another album this year, but we haven’t even written any songs yet.
When you do have time off from your bands, are you going to gigs and shuffling through record stores—is there time to be a fan?
I’m a music fan mostly just by walking around and listening to music. It’s really hard for me to get up the momentum to go to a show when I’m on tour the rest of the year. It’s kind of like going to Starbucks if you work at Starbucks your whole life. (laughs)
Is there any part of the process that you struggle with more than others? Like do the words tend to come easier than the music, or vice versa?
You mean for Neon Blonde or just in general?
Let’s say in general.
Well, until I did this Neon Blonde record, I really struggled with trying to complete anything, musically. I’ve been writing lyrics for maybe 13 years now, so that’s all pretty second nature to me. But until I did this record, I’d never really finished with the music to a song.
This may be a poorly researched question, but what’s the significance of the Black Cactus? We had the “Black Cactus Choir” and now there’s the “Black Cactus Killers.”
It’s kind of a long story. When the Blood Brothers signed to ARTISTdirect, I knew that I was going to do something like this some day. And you could put in that you can do certain bands within the contract, because we were all in other bands at the time—Cody was in a band called Waxwing, and et cetera. I was in the band Soiled Doves at the time, so I just put Black Cactus Choir in as the band that I could do. Originally I was going to call it that, but V2 was cool enough to let me do whatever I wanted as far as a name. But I wrote that song when I was still planning to call the band “Black Cactus Choir.”
Some of my favorite lyrics on the record are on “Chandeliers and Vines.” There’s the one line that lumps CNN in with Full House and MTV. Is it safe to say, then, that you’re not a fan of the 24-hour news network?
I’m not a fan at all. I find it interesting that television has become so short attention span. I find the media kind of fascinating. I like to write about it.
Haven’t you had some experience with MTV? That leads me to wonder if they’re a little more likely to step outside their comfort zone than I’d otherwise believe.
Actually, I haven’t had any experience with MTV. Blood Brothers have never been played on MTV. There are bands that are way smaller than us that get played all the time. I think it’s label politics; I think maybe someone there just doesn’t like us.
Hm, that’s interesting. I thought I’d read something about you guys getting some play there.
I’m sure our videos have been played like a dozen times or something. (laughs) Pretty insignificant.
Going back to “Chandeliers and Vines,” there’s that brief freak-out right around the middle of the song that’s kind of reminiscent of “A Day in the Life” or something. But some reviews seem to have interpreted it as a safeguard against accessibility. Is that something you keep tabs on, wanting to make sure that songs aren’t too accessible?
It’s hard because I grew up with people who were always very avant-garde in their songwriting. All of the bands that I grew up playing in—every song, there were no repeating parts, the structures were all very strange. Whereas with most people it would be challenging to write songs that are off-kilter, it’s more of a challenge for me to write things that are straightforward, just because my upbringing was a little skewed. With that particular song, then, it wasn’t that I was trying to throw people for a loop. It’s just that I thought it needed something else, that it came to a point where it was getting kind of stale and needed to be spiced up.
So how do you keep your vocal chords in shape? Do you work with a coach?
I’ve taken voice lessons, on and off. When I took them, my teacher made me a tape of scales and stuff like that, just to warm up, and I pretty much do those every day.
It seems like it would be grueling—the touring, especially.
Yeah, it’s hard. I only really lose my voice, honestly, at the beginning of every single Europe tour. I have sleeping problems and I don’t really do that way with jetlag, so inevitably the first three days of any tour in Europe, I don’t sleep…which is really terrible for your voice.
What’s been the toughest audience you’ve had to face down? And is that a “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” thing or the sort of thing you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy?
Actually, Blood Brothers just got done touring with Coheed & Cambria, and that was a really hard audience to play for. On this last record, Crimes, we didn’t really do any support tours; we just went out on headlining tours. That gets to be pretty safe after a while. Everybody that’s coming to the show is coming to see you, and they’re all stoked to see the songs, and it’s gratifying and fun and it makes you feel good every night. But there’s something to be said for getting up in front of like 2,500 people, most of whom have never heard you at all, and having to basically prove yourself to them. It’s really humbling, and it kind of reminds you of why you started playing music in the first place. It’s good and bad. We got a lot of booing and all that, but I’d rather have reaction from people than indifference.
Yeah, I recently had a Coheed fan say that I deserved to be shot for something I’d written about that band, so I can appreciate that animosity.
Yeah, yeah, it’s weird. I don’t understand that band at all, but that’s another story.
We’d better not get into it or we’ll both get death threats. I have to admit that I’m not familiar with The Vogue and your earlier bands, but I’ve read that you attracted a pretty healthy buzz in those early days, at a very young age. Were you working with labels and publicists and everything at that point?
No, not really. We were on this label called Made In Mexico, which put out the early Pedro the Lion stuff. We got probably a bit more buzz in Seattle than was warranted. We went on a few tours, but nobody really knew who we were, and it was never really that big of a deal. I think people just got freaked out because we were pretty young and we were playing music that was pretty out there. A lot of people compared it to Gang of Four or The Fall, but we’d never even heard them, really. It was a weird situation.
I know you have a passion for T-shirt design. Do you have gems in particular in your own collection?
I’ve been wearing this H&M shirt that I bought in Wales pretty much every day. It’s kind of paradoxical to how I make a living, but I tend to wear the same thing every day. (laughs) Once I get something that I find really comfortable, it’s hard for me to switch it up.
Are you designing the Neon Blonde shirts?
Yeah, we only have one right now. [Editor's Note: Visit http://www.crystalcityclothing.com ]
A quick change of topics… I saw that R. Kelly was frequent tour van listening for you.
Yeah! (laughs)
So you’ve seen the Trapped in the Closet epic, then?
Oh, yes.
A fan?
Big fan! That dude is out of his mind. (laughs) |
