Everclear

Folks, Everclear is poised and on their mark for their new release, So Much For The Afterglow. Capitol Records will be releasing the new CD on October 7th. To all of you Slug-Heads, Superfreaks and ’70s retro-Geeks who live in your own warped vortex and don’t follow time or the 12 month-cycle Calendar, that means right about NOW!!!

I’ve heard this disc, and I’ve heard this disc over and over again. In fact, I can’t stop. Talk to anyone that knows me, and they willtell you right now I’m definitely marching to the beat of a different drummer when it comes to music. I’m so bored with new music right now that I’m lost in tunes gone by. But I’m here to tell ya, brothers and sisters, this is the shit for the fall and winter months. This is going to keep your soul warm right through to the spring time! The head drill sergeant at SLUG HQ and Donna at Capitol hooked me up with an advanced copy CD (Thank you Donna…XOXOX to you!) and quite simply, I love it.

What can I say, besides to go buy it and check it out for yourself? You’ve heard “Everything To Everyone” on the radio. I know you’ve been bobbin’ your head and hitting your dashboard to that one while stuck in I-15 construction. You want technical? Okay. Everclear shows more depth and maturity above and beyond Sparkle And Fade. This is not only pronounced in their use of various instruments and song structures, but also found in their lyrics and how close those lyrics hit home. Just between you and I, there is one song on the album that almost brought me to tears; not just the first time I heard it, but the first two times I heard it. Yea, it hit that close to home. (Did Everclear? Hell, No! Prince maybe, but not Everclear.)

I had the great opportunity to speak openly with Art Alexakis one morning via telephone. He was in Oregon, I was in the SLUG Penthouse Suite at the top of the Marriott in downtown Salt Lake. According to the printed material on the CD sleeve, Everclear is three guys and a wheelbarrow full of instruments and talent. Art Alexakis: vocals, guitars, steel guitar, keyboards, banjo, mandolin, toy piano, acting out; Craig Montoya: bass guitar, vocals, keyboards, mandolin, assorted chicken noises and Greg Eklund: drums, percussion, vocals, keyboards, slide whistle, brain cloud.

We enter the conversation mid-way through the interview process. Let’s listen in and see what Art has to say…

Art Alexakis: …this, (new album So Much For The Afterglow) is much more a groove-oriented record and I like that.

SLUG: Yeah and that brings me to my first main question. Tell me about “Distorted Melody,” or “El Distorto De Melodica.”

AA: That started as just a jam that I had – just guitar riffs and different ideas. I’m really into using the samples and loops, but in a different way than other people. Basically, I had this experimen­tal idea. I said, OK, we are going to free-form jam, which we don’t do very often, for 10 minutes on this riff. I’m going to go into different things, you guys try different things and let’s just work on this. So we jammed for about 10 or 15 minutes in the studio and recorded it all. It was basically one guitar, one bass and six or seven mics on the drums, no doubles, no overdubs, nothing. I put that down into Pro Tools, which is a computer program for recording, then Lars Fix and I went through it. 

We took out different parts here and there and we basically paired this thing down to a two and a half, three minute song. Then I would take one noise like from the end of the song and I would take it from here and put it over there. I would add little accents. I just started screwing with it, which is why the program is so great. You can reverse cymbals, you take a cymbal and actually turn it around in the computer to get a certain sound. On top of that, I added another guitar and then another couple of guitars. Then I just started screaming through a distortion pedal. Then we looped some percussive stuff that Greg did and added that. So it’s a totally organic song. It doesn’t have any jack-beats or anything like that, but it has that full-on, almost techno sound coupled with, like Led Zeppelin. I think it’s really cool.

SLUG: Well, when you said the album grooves, that’s why I thought this song was a good place to start, because to me, the first time I heard “El Distorto De Melodica,” I’m serious: I thought it was a great dance song. It’s got this heavy, funk grind to it.

AA: I talked about doing a club mix of that.

SLUG: You should! I throw it on and it’s hard to sit still. 

AA: Well thank you, that is the ultimate compliment. I thought it was fun to have that song on there just for the sheer fun of the music. My lyrics get a lot of attention, but I think our music is not just all lyrics based. I think if we were all lyrics based music, we wouldn’t have been as successful as we have been blessed to have been. I think we showcase the music a lot more on this record, with a lot more diversity.

SLUG: What’s the feedback you’re getting from the new album?

AA: Literally, I haven’t heard one negative. The worst I heard was from Cake Magazine and they said, “If you love Sparkle And Fade, you’ll like this one. There’s not much change, but it sounds like Everclear.” I was just going, you people obviously didn’t listen to Sparkle And Fade. 

SLUG: They just missed the whole point.

AA: No. Basically, literally Royce, I don’t think they listened to either of them. They might have thrown it on and gone, yeah OK, whatever, there’s Art’s voice, whatever. I don’t see how you can listen to “Santa Monica” and then listen to the new sin­gle, “Everything To Everyone,” and not think they are trying something different here, regardless if you like it or not, regardless if you think we pull it off. That’s fine, that’s opinion and that is what people are being paid for. But to me, to say that we sound the same is just shoddy journalism.

SLUG: l’ve been hearing “Everything To Everyone” quite a bit on the radio here.

AA: We’ve had a great relationship with that radio station there. They helped to break us early and they’ve been pretty strong on all of our tracks.

SLUG: On So Much For The Afterglow is that you guys, singing harmonies?

AA: That’s us!

SLUG: Are you going to do more of that?

AA: Umm, that’s the type of stuff the Beach Boys used to do. It’s over dubbed and stuff, but yeah, I would like to. I just wanted something there and even after we did that, it wasn’t supposed to be the first song on the record. Amphetamine was, because we had some weird noise intro into it. But it came off sounding kind of hokey to me. I got into arguments with one of my best friends, who is my A&R guy, about it. He just thought that “So Much For The Afterglow” was the wrong song to open the album with. And he’s even admitted to me that out of all the people that have heard an advance copy of the CD, only one person has told him that they shouldn’t have started the album with that song and everyone else thinks it should be a single. 

SLUG: Tell me about “This is a song about Susan / This is a song about the girl next door.”

AA: I was writing this song just about relationships, you know? Just talking about it, and thinking about it and I was playing this song and my wife was walking around. And I didn’t have the first couple of lines, but I had, “So much for the afterglow.” I had the melody, and I liked it. I want to do something like, “This is a song about…” I liked starting the song like that. I like the way the album starts, you hear our voices and BOOM! My wife comes up to me and says, “Well, you know Susan…” This crazy chick next door, who is just an amazing person. She walks around wear­ing Far Side glasses and tiaras, she’s not insane. She is one of the most intelligent, wonderful people you would ever meet. Her and her boyfriend are just so cool. Susan will tell my wife, Jenny, “Well, every song that Art writes, Jenny, is about me, just so you know. Cause any song that anyone writes is about me.” So I’m just playing around, and I sing, “This is a song about Susan,” and I’m like hey, that kinda works. This is a song about the girl next door, I’m like aahh! OK! Because, you know, the implication is there and it’s very cool. So now she’s so excited about HER song.

SLUG: That’s so funny.

AA: Yeah, it’s pretty funny. I’m really happy with how the record sounds. Regardless of what other people think, as a band we are just really pleased with it. We feel like we’ve made a record considerably different from Sparkle And Fade, but it sounds even more like Everclear. We tried different things with different textures and no rules. We love the lushness. We had Andy Wallace come in and really add balls to the mix.

SLUG: Yeah, I think you hit it on the head. I think it sounds killer.

Not only are you going to love this CD, you are also going to love them live… and for FREE!! Everclear will be playing live at Media Play, 7170 SO. 1000Ea., on Thursday, October 16 at 6:00p.m. They are only doing 12 of these types of shows across the nation and this is one of them. Bring your mom, bring your kid sister, hell… bring your grandpa and grandma, it’s a free show so you’ve got nothing to lose… loser! I’ll be there and as the old song says, “I’ll be alone, dancing, you know it baby.” Remember, you read it here first!

Slug 4 life! Ciao-baby! — Royce

Read more from the archives:
Written in Blood: June 1997
No Doubt: The End of Solidarity Is Irony

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