Keith Murray of We Are Scientists: The MusicSnobbery.com Interview

You may be tired of your dance rock bands sporting skinny black ties and wearing black eye liner, but there is always room for something a tad more "not so serious." Enter We Are Scientists -- the California-native, Brooklyn-based trio who are known in these NYC parts as a heck of a live act. Even if you haven't experience their high-energy gigs, you can see in their videos that they are having fun with their new found notoriety.

With their debut album With Love and Squalor already making the Britons dance in their Ben Sherman jumpers, Keith Murray, bassist Chris Cain and drummer Michael Tapper are in the position to make U.S. listeners leave their cozy homes for the excitement of a live concert venue.

Thanks to the MTA transit strike, it was easier for me and lead singer Keith Murray to talk over the phone. So I would like to welcome Keith Murray to this space ...

Now, I'm going to start off with a really boring question. You can answer it seriously or you can just joke around with it. How did the band get together?

We got together at ... school. You know I almost said university, that's how long I've been doing press in the U.K. It just seems unnatural that we got together at college ... It was that age old thing where we all liked the same girl. She was a professor and we all were in the same class. The only way we knew how to get her attention was to form a highly literary band. That turned into We Are Scientists. Any literary aspect has fallen off and we're now illiterate.

Yeah, we met in school and we were all really bored. That's the short version.

How did you develop the sound? You have a distinctive guitar-driven dance rock vibe going through your music. Was there ever a mission statement on what the band should sound like?

It was an evolution. When we started out we were just a straight punk band. Just by living in New York from 2000-2005, we were listening to The Rapture and Liars. So that sound soaked in there. It was just a matter of all the stuff that surrounded us at the time. It did bring us to that dancey curve. Plus, just being three guys and me being the main songwriter kept everything guitar-centric. Recently, I've been trying to drop out more guitar just to use it as texture, but it just doesn't work. I still turn up the guitar up too much.

Why the move to New York after being in California?

We moved after college. At the time, we weren't serious about being in a band. It was literally, "we all graduated -- we have reasonably respectable degrees, where can we go?" Chris and I had lived in San Francisco already and we hated L.A., so New York was the viable option. It seemed like a fun place to live in our post-collegiate times. And we were right.

There must have been some lean times in those early years.

Definitely, we weren't serious for a long time. It was kind of a hobby, because we all had jobs. We just didn't want to sit around after work and drink in bars. So the band was a way of being productive after work. It started out just playing to friends and friends of friends. We didn't think it would lead to being a full-time job. If you asked us two years ago that we would be doing this as a profession, we would have said that there was no chance us of doing that.

So you put together some demos through the years. Was it a struggle to find the sound that you ended up with today?

We recorded some EPs which we self-released. Those were pretty bad, but we progressively got better. We recorded the demos for this album which was released as an EP called the Wolf's Hour with the guy that ultimately produced the album, Ariel Rechtshaid. So we recorded with him and we really liked how they turned out. He helped us capture the live show, which was why we went with him.

What were you being told from record people about the demo?

I don't think any record people actually heard our demos, until the last round of demos were put out. In the beginning, we weren't serious about it and none of us had any business savvy. We didn't have a manager until recently.

A friend of ours worked at a record company, so he was helping us out. Once we recorded our last round of demos, he became our manager. So he quit his job and we quit our jobs, and that's when we started to take the band seriously. Then we shopped around our demos. It was a happy accident that by the time we were business wise, the demos had music on it that was coming off pretty well. I can imagine that if we were passing around our old demos, the labels would have never listen to them.

You got to make With Love & Squalor with former Hippos frontman Ariel Rechtshaid. What kind of musical guidance did he give you?

He's a laid back guy. I didn't even know he was in a band before we did our demos with him. He was our manager's roommate. He said he would record it and we went along with him as a friend. I don't even think we paid him for the demos. He did them as a favor.

By the time we recorded the album, he knew what we were into. We just went into the studio and recorded the live show. We spent a lot of time working on arrangements for the live show because there is only three of us. We had to fill it up as much as possible. When we got to the studio, it would have been weird to add additional instruments and beats.

So Ariel will let you do what you want to do. On the other hand, he is opinionated and he'll tell you, "You're doing it wrong. I'm going to record this way and your idea is terrible. When I record it, you'll see why." I'll say, "Ariel, you're crazy." Then we'll record it and listen to the playback. Then, I begrudgingly have to admit that he was right ... occasionally [laughs].

Did the album turn out how you expected?

It's pretty much the sound of our live show. We put our heads down and plowed through the recording process. It took us about three weeks.

Where did you record it?

We did it in L.A. where Ariel and our manager lives. We went to a crappy studio in North Hollywood where the computer was always breaking down. So we drank the whole time when that happened. It was totally laid back, so I think it came out as we expected. I don't think we tried to use the studio as a place to experiment. At that time, we weren't signed and didn't have much of a budget. In the future, we might devote more time to messing around in the studio. We pretty much got that out of the way in rehearsing before the album.

What song on the album did you work on the most?

It's weird because there's a song on the album called, "Textbook." It wasn't recorded with the first batch of songs. We recorded twelve songs in the first round. Then we got signed and the label said to us, "We're going to need some B-sides." So we said, "Oh, crap." I had already started writing some new songs that would have possibly gone on the next album. As it turned out, we needed them for B-sides. "Textbook" was one of those. We spent so much time thinking and re-thinking it. When we finally recorded it, we liked it so much we put it on the album and took one song off.

When I was in England, I saw your CD displayed in every store I went to, so I gathered you have a larger following in the U.K. than in the states. Is that by design?

It wasn't by design. It happily fits into that new sleazy template of once The Strokes got big in the U.K., now labels are after you. In actuality, it started before we got signed. We played SXSW. Steve Lamacq of Radio One was at the show and he came up to us and said, "Hey, you should really come to the U.K. and be on my show." That's a good deal. Our booking manager in the U.K. gave Steve our rough mixes of the album before we were ever finished with them. I suspect that because it was the first song on the CD, that he started playing "Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt." It eventually became our first single.

It was an organic thing. Once we signed to Virgin, they recognized that there was some momentum in the U.K. and that there was a demonstrated template for American bands making a break for it in the U.K. So Virgin put more effort in getting the album out in the U.K., and it ended up being released there first.

Do you feel more or less pressure being signed to a major label?

It's more personal pressure. I don't feel the corporate pressure in that we have to make a certain amount of money. We finished the album before we signed with them, so they knew what they were getting. So if something didn't go as planned, they couldn't blame us.

I do feel personal anguish in how well I want to do. I've met a lot people at Virgin and don't want to let them down. So the pressure comes from wanting to be in a good position to take advantage of the opportunities given to us.

I looked on Amazon.com Monday and saw that your sales ranking was 24,438. After you appeared on Letterman, it rose to 6,599...

[Laughing] Let me tell you about how thrilled I am at being number 6,000. It feels pretty frickin good. Top of the world, Mom!

Tell me about being on Letterman.

It was a weird and surreal experience. We went in that morning and did the sound check where you stand on an empty stage in an empty theater surrounded by disinterested stage hands. Then you play the same song eight times. Then they tell you to come back at three, so you come back at three where they put you in a dressing room until five. So we're literally doing nothing for two hours. They bring you downstairs and they open the door. They usher you in and David Letterman is sitting at his desk to your left and Paul Shaffer is standing three feet to your right. You play for three minutes and you're done. Then they kick you out. It was over in a weird blur.

Did you get to talk to Letterman?

At the end, he comes over and shakes your hand and says, "Good job, thanks for coming." It was pretty amazing, the band on Letterman were super cool, but I don't know if they were genuinely excited or putting on a show of excitement. I'm sure they don't know who we are. We walked out and the guitar player had a Telecaster and I have a Telecaster, so he was completely thrilled by that. While we played, Paul Shaffer was standing to the side watching us and saying, "Good ... good." Everybody was really nice. David Letterman was very pleasant to us.

Jim Carrey was the main guest that night. We had never met him before and we were walking down the hall past him. We were just trying not to make eye contact, because he must get horded everywhere he goes. Then he just yells out, "Scientists!" It was all very odd.

We Are Scientists will be on the left coast (tour dates) post-Christmas before returning to the right coast in January. Good luck all you U.K. folks getting a ticket for their sold out NME ShockWaves Tour in January-February, where they will share the bill with Arctic Monkeys and Maximo Park. With Love and Squalor is out now.

That's it until after Christmas. Charrissssm maaasssss. Do they have Christmas in France? Anyway, enjoy your holiday, you knuckleheads.