WIUX

On October 26th, 2007, I got to sit down for an interview with local Bloomington band The Alarmists (Calm Down.) Present at the start of the interview were Mike Bushman (guitars/vocals), Neal Warner (electric bass), Jeremy Ness (drummer), Andy Goheen (drummer/choreographer), Molly Paganski (friend of band.) and me. The band is set to release their debut EP Deep Shivers Run For My Daughter on November 2nd with a badass show at the WIUX station house.

Neal: I got this shirt. Look at this. (holds up shirt with a squirrel on it.)

Molly: What’s that say?

Mike: “Totally Nuts Bawls.”

Neal: (laughing) I have no idea what that means.

(laughter)

Mike: That’s awesome! (more laughter) He’s going [to Halloween festivities] as an ironic zombie.

John: I’m seeing levels on this recorder, so I think it’s making… recordings.

(laughter)

Molly: As it is meant to do.

Neal: Sweet. I’m going to take the sleeves off this shirt. No, I think I’ll keep it like this, and I’ll shave my facial hair down to a thin mustache.

Mike: Yeah, either a really trashy one or a Hulk Hogan one.

Neal: Yeah.

Jeremy picks up a transparent sheet with “The Alarmists (Calm Down)” and other things written on it.

Jeremy: Oh shit! What is this for?

Mike: I don’t know why it was made.

Molly: When you screen-print, that’s like a template that you use.

Andy: Have you not seen that design yet?

Jeremy: No, I haven’t.

Neal: I didn’t know that you hadn’t seen the CD.

Molly: That’s what your CD looks like.

Mike: Yeah! That’s what the CD that’s coming out in a week looks like! (Mike goes upstairs)

Jeremy: Sweet! (laughter) I’m just along for the ride. (laughter)

John: So I guess I’ll ask a question then.

Jeremy: Ask it while Mike’s out of the room.

John: I guess you guys could go ahead and introduce yourselves.

Jeremy: Hey, I’m Jeremy. I’m one of the drummers in the band.

Neal: I’m Neal, and I play the electric bass.

Andy: I’m Andy, and I don’t know what my position in the band would be titled.

Neal: Drummer. Choreographer. (laughter)

John: Cool. I guess the big news…

(the pitter patter of Mike’s feet down the stairs can be heard)

Jeremy: Here comes Mike. Why don’t you introduce yourself, Mike?

Mike: I’m Mike.

Neal: What do you do?

Mike: I play guitar.

Neal: Oh, that’s pretty sweet. Yeah. Anyways…

Mike: I sing.

Neal: The “big news,” I guess, is that we’re putting out a CD called Deep Shivers Run For My Daughter at the end of next week [Friday, November 2nd.] It’s going to be at WIUX, 8 o’clock sharp. We’re going to be playing with Mouthbreather, The Delicious, and Amo Joy.

John: 8 sharp AM or PM?

Neal: Umm… (looks to Mike) it’s PM, right?

(laughter)

Mike: Was the question like, “What’s going on?”

John: Yeah. Or like the big news, I guess, which is the EP.

Neal: We’ve been working on the recordings for a while so we’re pretty excited about it.

Andy: Neal did it all himself.

John: Yeah, that’s what I heard. And I got the chance to listen to it earlier. Mike gave me a copy of it a couple of hours ago, and to be a non-objective interviewer, I really liked it; especially the mastering, I thought, was really solid and professional.

Neal: Thanks, thanks very much. Cool.

John: And I thought it was interesting that in the live show, you hear the drums quite a bit. They’re a big force, kind of thunderous and stuff, but on the EP, there’s like a complete drum set and everything.

Neal: (Nods in agreement) I mean, we still use what we normally use live, but it’s just, I think just by nature, on the record, it’s like, when you have independent control over everything, I mean, the drums just have more impact live especially because of the visual of the bouncing around of both arms, standing up, hitting the stuff. These recordings were done with mostly just Jeremy’s kit so there’s the absence of the element of an entirely other drum.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, I think they come across a little bit more in headphones just because of panning stuff. You know, it’s a little more representative of the live thing, but yeah, I think a lot of it is the visual.

Neal: And speaking of the headphone thing, this mix, when I listen to it on headphones, it’s almost a little severe, the panning and stuff, some of it’s almost kind of jarring. And that’s cool, but I feel like getting the best experience out of this record, for me, is definitely listening to it with a set of speakers with loud volume.

John: Yeah, I’ve listened to it twice so far. The first time was in some speakers, not too loud though, and the second time was in my car pretty loudly, like loud enough probably to lose a couple of those things that keep you from going deaf. (laughter) And personally I preferred the car version.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, they were mixed to be played loud. And with our music, the loudness is a part of it. There are parts that are written to be played loudly.

Neal: Yeah, they’re all voiced kind of that way, especially the guitar. I mean, Mike spends a lot of time on his tone so I went to great lengths to try to catch that. A lot of times what happens is that you get a smaller amp in the studio and you don’t turn it up as loud or something, and I tried to do my best to capture that live sound of his on the record. I mean, it didn’t totally come across just because it’s a recording, but you know, we went into a big space and cranked up the amp pretty loud and I just plugged my ears and set a microphone in front of it so, you know, I thought it turned out pretty well. And there are definitely things on the record that I would do differently next time. These are recordings that Drew Vandenberg and I worked on for almost a year, just kind of a hodgepodge of different things that I kind of put together, so, yeah, I think the next recording will be more cohesive. This one is definitely, I’m definitely really happy with it in the meantime.

John: I think that a good question for people who may not be familiar with you, who have never seen you live and aren’t really familiar with your music, would be how do you describe your sound?

Mike: I mean, I don’t really know. I mean, uh…

John: Or what can they expect to get out of your show?

Neal: It’s definitely pretty loud.

Mike: Yeah. The guitar parts go from being pretty angular to shoegaze-y almost. Bass goes from soul to straight-up rock n roll stuff. The drums, I guess, are a pretty huge part of it with the untraditional kit.

Neal: Yeah, the idea with the untraditional kit was that we would have almost a battery element to it or something. I don’t know, just a couple of guys up there, standing up and beating on shit as opposed to like.. I mean, there’s definitely parts and everything, but it’s just kind of like the idea is that you just walk away with this concussion of like… you know, there are two people with four drumsticks total so it’s just a lot of volume.

Andy: And it’s danceable.

Mike: And it’s danceable! That’s a good point.

Jeremy: It’s very danceable.

Andy: That’s why I think that it’s fun standing up and playing the drums. I can dance.

Jeremy: It’s why people like us.

(laughter)

Mike: That’s a good point. It is danceable. That’s a huge part of it. We try to make sure that everything’s got kind of a groove.

John: Obviously, you all have dedicated a lot of time to The Alarmists, and I was wondering how you balance your school work and your college life with this very time-consuming band.

Neal: Mike doesn’t.

Mike: I don’t.

(laughter)

Mike: I mean, I kind of don’t. (laughter) I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, I guess we’re all pretty busy people. Andy’s a Union Board Director. I’m sure he does other shit. (laughter) No, he works with Spirit of ’68 Promotions, and Neal’s in a crazy busy semester, and I don’t really know what you do, Jeremy. (laughter)

Jeremy: I’m getting my ass kicked by this semester. A lot of work.

Mike: Yeah, we’re all super busy. I don’t really know how we do it.

Neal: I mean, Jeremy and I both have jobs and really busy schedules. And we just have one practice a week. That’s all we can really afford ourselves time-wise. Plus, Mike, Andy, and I are in another band, Sticky and the Bees, which we’ve just started dealing with really during this semester. So, there’s definitely a ton of shit, but I mean, everybody here has a ton of shit going on.

Mike: I mean, it’s just the one night a week thing that, you know, it’s set in stone so we’ve always got that to kind of fall back on. You know, it took a few weeks or a month at the beginning of the semester to kind of carve that out, but it’s been carved out. The house we practice at knows that we could play, and we just build our weeks around Wednesday night to make sure it happens.

Andy: I build my life around Wednesday nights. (laughter)

Neal: Yeah, I mean, we’d definitely like to have more time to write. I would personally like to have more time to mess around with tech shit which is kind of another role of mine in the group. I’ve been getting into some more live processing, and me and Mike would like to incorporate that, and we would love to write some more. A lot of times we are only able to have time to just rehearse and stuff.

Mike: Yeah, it’s just a lot of maintenance rehearsal.

John: Cool. Okay, so I guess, travel in your minds back to the past… (laughter)

Neal: I like this question.

John: I guess, discuss the origin story of The Alarmists (Calm Down.)

Neal: Oh, one of those? It’s one of those things that people put on MySpace when they actually think that somebody cares.

John: Yeah. I was just wondering where the connection came from.

Neal: Mike and I grew up together.

Mike: Yeah, we grew up together and we both played in bands. We bought our first instruments together with the idea of playing in a band. We played in bands in high school and stuff.

Neal: We won’t talk about those.

Mike: Yeah, but Neal had an idea for starting something resembling this band. He had a recording assignment for one of his classes and wrote this song and asked me to come and sing some stuff on it. I guess it kind of sprang from that song. Jeremy, we actually found Jeremy, we were looking around on Facebook for a drummer.

Neal: That’s cheesy, isn’t it?

Jeremy: Yeah.

Neal: I mean, it’s definitely a good way to find people.

Mike: Well, it is kind of fucked up though.

Neal: Anyway, we found Jeremy. His profile picture was him beating on a garbage can with drumsticks so we thought he was probably appropriate.

Mike: Yeah, and Andy we knew through some of the people that we grew up with. And I mean…

Neal: Well, you’re roommates.

Mike: We’re roommates also now.

Andy: I don’t know. I always I thought I was kind of like the fanatic who pushed himself into the band.

(laughter)

John: Your song “Diamonds” was on the Live From Bloomington 2007 compilation. It is in a pretty different form here on the EP. I mean, it’s a pretty similar song, but the production is a lot different. I guess, tell me a little bit about that song.

Neal: We did use the same audio. I remixed it for the album, and that’s why it’s quite a bit different. We added a lot of elements. As far as the groove or whatever, most of the elements on the recording are the same as on the LFB compilation. For one, the compilation master is kind of disappointing. There’s a lot of level disparity in between a lot of the tracks on there because it was done pretty hastily. This one has been especially remastered. It’s much hotter, as you can probably hear. It’s a little more smashed, a little brighter. And we added the foot stomps and the claps, and I like that, especially because of the Reggaeton kind of vibe that we have in the verse, I like the way it works with the stomps and claps. It’s just kind of fun.

Mike: Is that what you’re asking about? The differences between the two versions or the song in general?

John: Well, now that we’ve covered the differences, I guess you could talk about the song in general.

Mike: We wrote it a while ago.

Jeremy: It was one of our first songs.

Mike: Yeah, it was one of the first songs we wrote. I guess the words, some of them are stolen from one of our older bands actually, but just kind of being frustrated with holier-than-thou religious types, in short, anyway. But I don’t know. I don’t really know what to say about it.

Jeremy: Remember the original chorus on it?

Mike: Yeah, there was a really different chorus on it that was this fast…

Neal: It was still kind of a jarring change, but it was kind of almost like we talked about wanting it to be like a Josh Homme kind of thing.

Mike: Yeah, yeah. It was kind of cock rock earlier.

Andy: (laughs) Now it’s just bumpin’.

Mike: Now it’s just bumpin’, yeah. It’s a format, I think, from talking to some people who come to our shows, like one of the dudes from Pattern Is Movement when we played with them a few weeks ago mentioned it, they find the chorus of that the most compelling of a lot of what we do. So I think we’re going to try to write some stuff more like that. Like, just kind of a beat that breathes a little that creates this groove with guitar kind of like cascading over the top.

Another member of Sticky and The Bees, Jacqui Cornetta, enters the room since they are going to start a Sticky and the Bees practice session right after the interview.

Neal: Would you like a Sticky and the Bees song on the interview too?

John: Well, I think it’s going to be on the internet most likely. I don’t know how to transcribe, like, a song.

(laughter)

Neal: You could put little music notes beside it.

John: But yeah, we can talk about Sticky and the Bees in a little bit. (Andy laughs) Well, there’s one question I wanted to ask about the Alarmists first. The lyrics and singing, like the actual words, kind of aren’t really the focus because so much other stuff is going on so they’re kind of overlooked, I think, by a lot of listeners. But they’re still really good, so I was wondering what you have to say about them.

Mike: First, I think we feel like the music is more important than the message, and also, if the vocals are too loud, it sucks all the energy out of the music. And that’s really lame. So we try to shy away from that as much as possible.

Neal: That was often a point of contention during the mixing process. Neither of us likes vocals.

Mike: I never want to hear the words.

Neal: Neither of us like vocals very hot, but Mike is always trying to get them totally buried in the mix.

John: Do you want to talk a bit about the messages that you have in your songs?

Mike: Yeah, we’re, to a frustrating extent to me, I feel like a lot of our songs, maybe too many, are about political and social sorts of issues. The first song on the record is not, and it’s sort of just trying to capture a dance party scene thing.

Neal: Yeah, it’s supposed to be a little light-hearted.

Andy: Sexy.

(laughter)

John: Alexander Hamilton: The definition of sexy.

(laughter)

Mike: You know, that was a part where we were like, you know, we’re going to do this thing like seven counts of music shouting something, and Jeremy at rehearsal was like, back in, what was it? Drum line?

Jeremy: Drum line. Back on the drum line, yeah, we used to, when we had sevenlets, out instructor taught us to just count, “Alexander Hamilton.”

Mike: So we’d just shout that.

Neal: It started at live shows. To keep together, at practice we decided to just shout something, and at practice we started shouting, “Alexander Hamilton.” And we decided to put it on the record.

Mike: I mean, I don’t know. Stuff ranges. It’s sort of embarrassing how specific some of the issues are, but “This is Surgical” is a domestic violence sort of situation, the verses of which are taken from an E.E. Cummings poem.

Neal: Used without permission.

(laughter)

Mike: And I wrote the chorus. But it’s not specific. I mean, it’s just like a really terrible domestic violence situation. The religious type stuff that I think is kind of weird, a lot of it’s kind of like that…We’ve got a hate crime song. We’ve got a song about awful shit that happens in northern Uganda.

Neal: We’ve got one about how the British government hired $35,000 worth of psychics to try to help with the Iraq War.

Mike: To find terrorists specifically. So yeah. Those things, I guess.

Andy: I’d like to remove myself from any political messages that this band presents. (laughter) I’m just in it for the dancing.

Neal: Usually, it’s a pretty big struggle to come up with words. It’s definitely the last thing that happens when we write a song.

Mike: I would like to eventually have a song, well, “$35,000”, which is the song about the psychics, was originally going to be about how shitty I am at courting women. (laughter) I think that’s probably the next song I’ll try to write. I’ve got some good stories.

Neal: Then we’re going to write one about how good I am at it. (laughter)

Jeremy: It’ll be one of those two-part songs.

John: Okay. So my next question will just be a phrase, and then you can expand upon it. (laughter) And the phrase is “Sticky and the Bees.”

(laughter)

Neal: Sticky and the Bees is a project that Mike and Andy and I are a part of.

Mike: And Jacqui, who’s here now too.

Neal: Jacqui’s here too. Say hi, Jacqui!

Jacqui: Hi.

(laughter)

Mike: No, Sticky and the Bees, Andy started it over the summer. He wrote some songs and played them by himself. And there was another show soon thereafter where Neal and I played, and there was another show soon thereafter where Jacqui and a guy named Graham who used to live here but is in Canada now played, and now it’s back to the four of us when we play.

Neal: It doesn’t relate in style at all to the Alarmists of course.

Mike: It’s way shittier. (laughter)

Andy: It’s way, way shittier. (laughter)

Neal: We bill ourselves [as Sticky and the Bees] as the “quietest band in Bloomington.”

Mike: (to Andy) You should say something about your band.

Andy: We’re having a show tomorrow, but no one’s going to be able to read this by then. (laughter) Oh! We’re both in the Battle of the Bands.

Mike: Yeah, the same fuckin’ night!

Andy: On November 20th.

John: What if you’re both up against each other in the finals?

Molly: It’s a win-win situation.

Mike: We’ll split the money. And the fame.

Andy: Three quarters of The Alarmists are in Sticky and the Bees, but the two main songwriters of the Alarmists are in Sticky and the Bees so they could totally sabotage Sticky and the Bees. I think I would be in on the sabotage of Sticky and the Bees also.

Mike: So Jacqui’s the only one getting fucked over. (laughter)

John: So Neal, how long have you been playing the saw?

Neal: I started learning it on my lunch breaks at work over the summer. Every couple times a week, I’d probably play during my lunch break. I’m not very good at it, but…

Andy: He’s awesome.

Jacqui: I disagree. You’re really good. It’s difficult.

John: You can make music out of a household object.

Andy: Let’s clarify this for the readers. Neal plays the saw in Sticky and the Bees.

(laughter)

Neal: I’m mostly excited about it because I’ve been looking for an opportunity to get my saw out if we’re on the road somewhere or whatever, (laughter) and I have to use it in its traditional fashion.

Mike: A fallen tree.

Andy: Or if I get frostbite and you have to cut off my hand.

Mike: When we’re playing a show in the mountainous region.

Neal: Yeah, it’ll be good.

(pause)

John: Sorry, my brain just shut off for a moment.

Neal: That’s fine.

John: That doesn’t mean that the interview’s over. It’s just weird. It’s a weird phenomenon. (laughter)

Neal: I feel like if people were listening to this interview, they would be more entertained maybe.

John: Yeah, well, you’ve said “shit” so many times that we can’t play it on the radio now!

Neal: Oh… shit! (laughter) Well, I mean, you could edit it. I could edit it for you.

Andy: Neal’s going to be our commercial downfall. (laughter)

Jeremy: You’re going to get sued by the FCC.

Neal: Mike said “fuck” a bunch of times. I’m definitely going to direct my parents to this interview.

Mike: Remember that show that we played at the station house, and Brian [Kerr]’s like…

Neal: Oh God, Brian kept telling us not to cuss, and for some reason…

Mike: You were like, it was like all you were doing was speaking in shits and fucks!

Neal: I just started cursing! I was in a surly mood.

Mike: Yeah, because this show wasn’t going extremely well.

John: Was this a Vibes show?

Neal: It was broadcast. And he was like, “Just don’t curse.”

Andy: It was the Live From Bloomington show, right?

Mike: Yeah, it was the LFB show.

Neal: They didn’t get sued.

John: Oh, so it was cursing on the air?

Mike: Yeah! (laughter) Like a lot. Like a lot a lot.

Andy: That was my first show.

Mike: Yeah it was!

Neal: I cursed like four times.

Mike: Yeah. Andy played drums.

Neal: Oh, it was that one.

Mike: (looks at John) How’s the brain doing?

John: (pauses and holds chest) I have gas. (laughter)

Then, I take a sip from a cup of water before my next question, which makes me feel like I’m interviewing The Alarmists (Calm Down.) on Inside the Actors Studio. So instead of asking whatever I was going to ask, I start talking about how I heard recently that James Lipton used to be a pimp in France. I’ll spare you the details. After that:

John: To get back on subject, you guys are, I guess, seasoned veterans in the local Bloomington scene, and I was wondering, what would be your advice to some upstart band that had no clue what they were doing?

Andy: Just dance. (laughs)

Mike: Just dance.

Neal: It’s funny to think of us at all as veterans.

Mike: Yeah, we haven’t been doing it for very long.

John: Yeah, it seems like you guys shot up in stuff like popularity pretty rapidly. Not that it hasn’t been a lot of constant work and stuff like that. It’s just interesting to see the progression of interest.

Mike: Yeah.

Neal: I mean, our early shows with just the three of us, we were doing a lot of different shit – a lot of different stuff - (laughter) and we were still experimenting a lot. Me and Mike spent a lot of hours in the basement of Wilkie fooling around and writing songs. To have it turn into what it has now is pretty weird because we used to have a keyboard element, and we used to rely way more heavily on the loops and stuff. We still rely pretty heavily on them, but now they add character instead of just like serve as the basis of a song more of the time.

Mike: I think we got better when we got a regular practice space, and when we established regular practice times. That was pivotal. I mean, we practiced in Wilkie’s basement, we practiced in the Neal Marshall Center because Neal was working there at the time, and practiced in a storage area or something in there. So we hauled all our shit in and hauled it out every time we had to play. It was a huge pain.

Neal: Excruciatingly inconvenient.

Mike: So just keeping things regular so that you don’t get too lazy with things, I think, is the reason that any of our songs are worth listening to.

Neal: I think another thing that made us better was just playing shows. We just got more and more shows, you know what I mean? Early on, we weren’t doing what we were doing really well, but what we were doing seemed to be interesting enough to people that people were still coming back a little bit, you know? So then when we actually worked our stuff out, I mean, Jeremy probably has one of the hardest times onstage just trying to follow my loops. If you can imagine, a loop is pretty unforgiving. So then we were able to just play and play and play and play. I think that was the only way you can get used to doing what you have to do is to keep doing it, if that makes any sense. I don’t know. You have to play your songs live or else you’re not going to know what you’re going to forget or not be able to pull off because you’re nervous because people are there or something.

Andy: If I might…I think, I guess, one of the reasons why I think the Alarmists themselves have been and are successful is…

Mike: The looks.

Andy: Yeah, it’s definitely the looks. (laughter) I mean, look at these guys. They’re beautiful. All of them. But I think they’ve always been really experimental and always been kind of forward looking and always trying to be innovative. Not in the sense that they’re trying to be the next huge…

Mike: The next Aerosmith.

Andy: Yeah. (laughter) But they’re always trying to challenge themselves and their songwriting. And I think that while being so experimental and challenging, they always consider their listeners. Like Mike was saying earlier how he took someone else’s suggestion, and he wants to write more songs with really big, spacey grooves or whatever you were saying.

Mike: The chunky beats with space.

Andy: Breathy beats.

Neal: Breathy beats. You know what that means.

(laughter)

Andy: So they’re interesting and challenging to listen to, but they’re always considering their listeners as well. And I don’t know where I was going with that, but they’re great.

(laughter)

Jeremy: I think that a really good piece of advice that one of my older buddies gave me to when I was still in high school, he said that if you can groove to it, then other people probably can too. So, if you can separate yourself from the music you’re playing and actually move your head up and down to it, it’s probably somewhat enjoyable. So if we can enjoy our music, then other people can probably enjoy our music.

John: Yeah, I was watching a documentary about jazz. Someone was interviewing Louis Armstrong, and he said that it’s good music if you can tap your feet to it.

Jeremy: Yeah, exactly.

John: But I think it becomes great music when you add all of those other elements.

How did you guys make the transition from playing house parties and stuff, I assume, to playing bars and stuff like that?

Mike: Actually, we didn’t ever play too many house parties. We still haven’t.

Neal: We’d actually like to get into playing some house parties.

Andy: But they have to furnish a timpani for us.

(laughter)

Neal: Yeah, a timpani’s on the rider.

Jeremy: It’s in our contract.

Neal: Actually, what first came was, especially with Mike and Andy’s involvement with Live From Bloomington, we’d take [IMU] NOISE shows and [WIUX] Vibes shows early on.

Mike: We played like three that first semester.

Neal: Stuff associated with LFB and stuff associated with the station are avenues on campus for student bands or whatever, and we played a few dormitory, you know, they have those little things outside their dorms where they serve hot dogs and hamburgers. We played a couple of those. A few of those, really.

Mike. A couple. Few.

Neal: Yeah, whatever. (laughter) So we went from there to, I don’t know when our first bar show was.

Jeremy: Bear’s Place.

Neal: We played an awful show at Bear’s Place, and that was our first bar show.

Jeremy: Two awful shows in a row.

Mike: That was our very first show. Our very first show was at Bear’s Place, wasn’t it?

Neal: Was it?

Mike: Yeah.

Neal: Okay.

Mike: Because you knew Erica who booked it from MAC or something.

Neal: That’s right. I knew this girl from the MAC who was booking there, and, uh… it tanked. I heard a couple of people who saw us months later say that they didn’t come to see us again after that show. They just happened to be at another show, and we were there. Playing bar shows is almost like, I love playing bars of course, but.

Mike: They’re financially necessary.

Neal: Yeah, you actually get paid, and that’s good.

John: Okay, well, I think I’ve taken quite a bit of your time. (laughter)

Neal: I mean, we have some shit to do. (laughter)

Jeremy: Yeah, if you could just get the hell out of here, that’d be great.

John: On behalf of WIUX, I guess, thanks for the interview.

Mike: No, thank you.

Neal: Thanks a lot for the interest and getting it together.

John: Cool. Cool beans.