Joey Cape talks about new Lagwagon album

During Pukkelpop fastival in Belgium RPM Magazine caught Joey Cape of Lagwagon and he said  about  sound of new  Lagwagon album "Hang" and other things. Read the whole interview at new RMP Magazine # 16 here

RMP:

The band has a new release coming out October 28th on Fat Wreck Chords titled “Hang”. What can we expect from the new album?

Joey Cape:

Well, it sounds like a Lagwagon album but maybe it is a little bit more focused on more guitar riffy stuff we used to do in the older days. And there’s a lot less pop on the record, it’s really aggressive and there are the lyrics I wrote over about two years’ time, which sort of make it’s a conceptual record. In loose terms, it’s kind of social commentary on now, what I see. And I’m really happy with it, I mean the most happy I’ve ever been time with any record I ever made. The whole bands is proud of the record and excited to play this record. This thing when you make a good record and you know it, you feel like you can’t wait to play those new songs. Which we’re not doing as we’re waiting to play the songs until the album comes out. It’s almost painful on this tour because maybe at a soundcheck we’re playing one of the new songs but we can’t play them in the set.

RMP:

The release of “Hang” was much anticipated since the last real Lagwagon album was “Resolve” in 2005. Nine years we had to waitfor a new Lagwagon release, what made it such a long process to release?

Joey Cape: 

We put out an EP in 2008 but it’s doesn’t count, it’s not the same as a full-length record. It’s going to be the first in 9 years or something. I always say the same thing: we’re a band that doesn’t want to rush things. If we don’t feel proud or really good about it then we just don’t make a record. It’s been probably unwise to act this way for our career but I think it’s more important that you look back someday and say that we were very proud of everything we made and did and made ourselves happy. I wrote a number of other recordsfor different projects that I have but I didn’t have that Lagwagon album in me for a long time. I didn’t want to change the band too much, I know what my band likes to play. It just took a long time and about two year ago ‘the light over the head’-thing happened. So I went to the guys with those ideas and material and I wanted to do something darker than I’ve done before. It was kind of funny since everybody was liking the riffs and the music but everybody was already kind of concerned about the concept. Especially the title and the news on the cover and all these things but now that it’s done everybody in the band is really, really happy. Sometimes it takes a long time. I do think many bands try to keep up this one to two year schedule of releases and I think this is why a lot of time there’s like one or two good songs on the record and the rest sounds like something of the other stuff you heard better before. I like everything on the record and there are many things on this record we haven’t done before.

RMP:

For the new album you’ve recently recorded in the Blasting Room Studios with the legendary Bill Stevenson and Jason Livermore. How has this been and any funny stories that happened during the recordings?

Joey Cape:  

We did drums there and the final mix, we mastered it there. But all the guitar, bass and vocal parts were done at a studio called Orange Whip studios which I worked in for like twenty years. We just did most of the music there because two of the guys live like in the town close to the studios. The two guys that work there are really old friends whom I played in another band called Bad Astronaut with. We mixed it up a little bit but I really like how we did it, the Blasting Room was amazing and it would have sounded probably as good but there’s something good in stuff in different places where you know what you will get. Bill and Jason are great, I didn’t get to see them on these recordings since our drummer went out there. We did something that we never done before. We recorded the whole record live at our drummer’s house and we took the live recording and tempo, mapped it so that we could record to a grid in Protools. But almost within every bar there were tempo changes, we kept the feel of the band and then we went out and kind of replaced. I’ve done this once before with Bad Astronaut and it works really well. Because when your band is playing a song there’s a lot of give and take and it’s real easy to get into the studio and sort of that sterilize all of that vibe. So no one needed to go but the drummer because he was basically playing with the band. It’s cool, you just replace everything with better sounds and then it sounds the way your band would play it live.