Ex Wife [Interview # 139]

1)      First and foremost I must say that you are from New Jersey and I remember when all those bands followed Taking Back Sunday out and created that emo scene.   Are there still a lot of those types of bands coming out of Jersey?  To paraphrase, Geoff Rickley once said that people in NJ form bands because there is nothing else to do (Which I vaguely remember because I saw that interview somewhere the other day) Would you agree?

Yeah, we still notice bands with that type of sound, but I think its usually older dudes feeling nostalgic, not that there’s anything wrong with that. I still listen to tons of music for that reason. 

The younger 'emo' bands that play in houses by us sound more like Mike Kinsella projects- like that mid-west sound, or some progression of it. Or sometimes even bands that sound something like Ampere or Saetia, but I haven’t noticed many 'emo' bands starting up by me, they are usually just passing through on tour from somewhere. 

As far as that Geoff quote, I don’t know. My friends and I have always been in bands. It’s just something we did. There wasn’t anything else to do because we didn’t want to do anything but play music. I’m not sure there should be any other reason but to have fun and maybe express yourself if you have trouble doing that.

2)       You are part of the shoegaze fun, which started in the NYC and has grown literally worldwide.  Is it strange to know that the sound isn’t just next door to you anymore and has now carried over across the globe?

Well, the first wave of shoegaze started in the UK/Irelend during the 1980s, so we've never really felt any proximity to it. It’s definitely cool that people are latching onto and creating resurgence within the genre a bit closer to home these days, but I’m not really sure how ex wife falls in with it. This is the first of our releases that’s donning the genre and we weren’t really setting out to make a shoegaze record or to all of a sudden be classified as a shoegaze band. It wasn’t a complete accident that we made a record with that style in mind, but I would say it was more so a result of getting heavier into amp and pedal experimentation and seeing what effect that had on how we were already writing music.

3)      Who would make for a worse Ex Wife:  Michelle Obama or Hillary Clinton?

Not even a clue.

4. You contributed a cover of New Order’s “Age of Consent” for a compilation to help fight hunger, which also featured such bands as Broadway Calls, Run, Forever, A Wilhelm Scream and Flashlights.  What was the process like between choosing a New Order song or a Joy Division song?

We picked Age of Consent because it’s a song we liked and thought it would be fun to play and dance around to… which it was! We didn't have any real plans of recording it, but Adam from Coffee and Cigarettes Clothing Co. asked us for a track to put on his compilation. We were in the process of demoing New Colors at the time, hadn’t banked any extra unreleased material and our other EPs were too old to rehash. So we said ‘what the hell’ and recorded the cover. We never really considered covering a Joy Division song; although that would have been really fun also.

5.)If you had to cover one Bon Jovi song, which one would you choose and why?

I know you asked what if we HAD to, but really you’d get more interesting answers regarding what we would do in order to not ever cover one Bon Jovi song…

Examples would be:  skinning ourselves with bic razors, forgetting our birth names and joining a cult, trying to believe in god again, telling our moms they suck, going wingshoot skydiving, cover Florence and the Machine, quitting music and turning our day jobs into ‘careers’.

6. Final thoughts, questions, shout outs, Toxic Avenger sightings, etc…? 

No Toxic Avenger sightings yet… I did drive by (what I was told to be) Bruce Springsteen’s house on the 4^th of July. It was decorated with a huge American flag that was apparently made with denim of all the rejected jeans from the ‘Born in the USA’ album cover shoot. Some Jersey historian told me he went through like… 250 pairs of pants that day cause he was really nervous about how his butt would look.