MuteMath | Life Changes
By Jameson Ketchum

ometimes complete and total isolation can lead to complete and total insanity. Other times, a great album is written. For New Orleans’ MuteMath, it took months of nothing but front man Paul Meany’s four walls to produce the group’s newest effort Odd Soul, out this month on Warner Bros. Its soulful, its funky, its everything you’d expect from the progressive trio. This time around the band wanted complete isolation including no outside opinions until the record was done, mastered, and signed off on by the band themselves. A risky choice, especially considering how much fan involvement means to the band. However, the result is a record full of personal stories, something some may argue we haven’t seen much of from MuteMath. Through this transitional decision to do everything themselves, the band have produced what they believe to be their best album yet and have discovered a formula for future successes. Hopecore.com spoke with MuteMath drummer Darren King recently, fresh off an avoided mugging in Providence, RI.

Hey Darren, how are you?

Darren King: Not bad, despite the fact that I got held up at knife point last night.

Okay, hold everything. You have to tell me what happened.

DK: I was just standing right outside our bus that was parked behind the hotel we were staying at in Providence, RI. And I just had the best day. I was really just in love with the city. All the sudden I turn around and I see this guy walking toward me with just a little too much purpose and we’re the only two people there. He had a bandanna around his neck and he lifts it up to cover his mouth and holds up a knife. I just run as fast as I can in the opposite direction and I can’t believe I was so polite, I said “No sir, please don’t!” while I was running. I didn’t even turn around to look but he didn’t chase after me. I just booked it around the corner and got to the hotel. It was so scary. It took me a really long time to calm down. I was pretty amped up after that.

There’s an older quote from Paul where he said that you “just want to make music, without catering to any particular genre or political or religious agenda. We just want to make music with no barriers.” As you continue to see your fan base and influence grow, do you feel that’s still an accurate mantra for MuteMath?

DK: No, I think we learned that often times the more specific and explicit we become with what we’re trying to say, in a weird way the more we have the chance to connect with more people or there’s more for people to want to take away from it. The goal on this record was to become specific and not for it to have a uniform sound but we did try to create rules and boundaries but the main rule was that we were going to produce it ourselves; we weren’t going to let anybody else work on it until we felt good about it. We weren’t going to allow anyone else in until we were happy with it and liked it.

MuteMath has played Warped Tour, Bonaroo and Lolapalooza as well as been featured in magazines from Alternative Press, HM and Paste. None many bands can say they have such a wide range of appeal. What does that mean to you?

DK: Certainly I’ve seemed to notice that more and more at the shows. There seems to be a wider variety of age represented in the audience as well. The more the merrier. I see that as a good sign. I get pretty encouraged by it. Seems like every show we’ve had on this tour there’s been at least one mama who’s just putting everyone else to shame with her desire to have fun at the concert. It’s very inspiring to me.

Yeah, I think the last time I saw you was on tour with 30 Seconds to Mars and there was no one too cool to not have a good time watching you guys.

DK: I really get into that feeling; I’ve gotten kind of addicted to that feeling of opening for bands that are very different from us. It’s sort of like you’re a kid on the first day at a new school standing in the lunch room, holding your tray, wondering if you’re going to make any new friends or not. You’ve got to win them over.

So getting into Odd Soul. On the last record there were many reports that it was a pretty strenuous process and you were even close to calling it quits early on. Would you agree with that statement? That being said, what did you all bring into the studio this time around to assure things went smoothly? (What did the isolation bring?)

DK: We recorded the second record Armistice about as painfully, frustratingly as possible. Lots of self doubt and lots of pressure, not so much coming from the outside of us but the majority of it was self-imposed. We simply knew we needed to create an environment where we were protected from ourselves. I think that the way we did that was producing the record by ourselves. Paul, Roy and I have been through a lot together, respect each other and can work together really easily. We understand each other well. We can accept each other’s encouragement and criticism well without taking it personally or thinking too much or too little of it. We’re on each other’s sides. It created a very safe place to screw up, to try things, just to work out and get a little geeky about it too. It was super fun in that regard. It was difficult, Paul called everybody who previously had been privy to everything that we do a long the way and told them that that wasn’t going to happen this time. It was, in fact, lonely. We were set up at Paul’s house for a few months and it was a quiet very slow time in life. Despite the difficulty of it, it was the easier we’d ever made a record because we eliminated so much of the unnecessary difficulties so only the inevitable and necessary frustrations remained.

“When we started having a few meals together, we started telling him some of our personal stories that he thought were interesting about us, and I’m referring mainly to the Odd Soul stuff, about growing up a charismatic Christian kid and being awkward, trying too hard little teenager.”So having this new self-contained formula, was there any worry that when you did show it to someone outside the process for the first time, that they wouldn’t like it?

DK: The goal was to get to the place where before anyone else heard it, we knew that if they didn’t like it, we just thought they didn’t have good taste. Not to sound arrogant, but the goal was to take however long it took until we at least had ten songs that we thought were really good and we’d gladly show to anyone and say “This is who we are and how we want to come across”. It was a little document of who we are and what we want to say in this time of our life. When we played the record for the new president of Warner Brothers, his suggestion to us was that he loved it and not that we needed to create more singles or it didn’t sound good. He thought it was crazy that we had gone to the trouble to master it even by ourselves; no one ever brought him something mastered to hear. We wanted it to be complete and have there be no excuse or opportunity to say it was inferior in any way. He could tell we were starting to tell a little bit of a personal story. When we started having a few meals together, we started telling him some of our personal stories that he thought were interesting about us, and I’m referring mainly to the Odd Soul stuff, about growing up a charismatic Christian kid and being awkward, trying too hard little teenager. He said we should try and dig further into that, write a few more songs and see if there’s more to that story. We got two more songs in particular from accepting his challenge. One being “Odd Soul” and the other being a song called “Walking Paranoia”.

So now that you know it works, will the whole isolation idea be something you continue to do?

DK: I do. Especially because for us songwriting and recording are simultaneous. Very rarely do we write a song without working on it in the studio at the same time so even if we employ the help of more people and if we ever attempt to employ the help of a professional producer again, it won’t be until after we’ve spent several months writing an album’s worth of songs, mixing and mastering it ourselves. At that point, its fun to see what someone else’s perspective can bring to it or what they might challenge you to try, you can try it out and say its better or not. But you know what you’ve got to start with is already something you’re proud of. That’s important. I think it’s just too dangerous. We were full of self-doubt, self-criticism and any extra self-doubt that gets added on top of it or we work with a producer who muddles the mind game side of it too much, it can just throw us into a tail spin.

You guys had a member change before the start of this studio time as well. How did the dynamic shift in the studio after this decision? Did it help or hinder the process?

DK: I’ve known Greg since I was about twelve years old. He was one of the reasons I started playing the drums because I went to church with him and I watched him play there. He had started a rock band with this girl I had a huge crush on. I went to every show they ever played and people made fun of me for how much I looked up to him and admired him. Whenever he quit the band I was broken hearted, I cried. It happened suddenly. We had a lot of arguments but he finally had enough one day and he just quit, “Take this as my resignation boys, I’m done” and he went out the door. That very day, Paul turned around to look at me and Roy and said “I was going to tell you that I’m expecting a little baby girl” and Roy said “That’s interesting, I was going to tell you guys today also that I’m expecting a second son”. So we sat in the living room and had a very serious conversation about what’s at stake for us, if we felt like we were through. We didn’t hesitate at all to say that we didn’t feel like we were through saying what we wanted to say. We felt like in many ways we were just getting started especially as songwriters. We had a record to make. Roy is a great guitar player, always has been, so that was the least of my worries. It was just a logistic sacrifice of it all, living in different places, going to New Orleans while also being away from our families a lot while making the record.

You kind of touched on this before as far as your aim with the new record but I want to know, why is this your best record, assuming you think it’s your best.

DK: I of course do. I always go through multiple phases while working on stuff. One moment I’ll think its genius and the next moment I’ll think it’s awful, just horrible. I’m pretty melodramatic about that, it turns out it’s never either of those things. I do like this record the most because I have this sort of feeling about it where if someone doesn’t like it, they almost wouldn’t like to be friends with me either. We’re really sharing more of ourselves; it’s far more biographical, more drawn from personal stories. I also think that in an interesting way, the album is more mature and more immature at the same time than our previous records. Both are an improvement. We didn’t make many goals; we made rules about protecting the creative place, not allowing that criticism while in the studio. The only other rules we made were that we wanted to have fun and we wanted it to feel like our live show. I think since we were raised in these wild charismatic churches where people would dance around and get sweaty and pray in tongues-something that came along with that is that the music is kind of loud and it can be emotional. Through years of having children and teenagers in that environment playing in those services two or three times a week, I think it groomed us into exciting performers just by nature of the way we approach the instrument with a certain amount of excitement and emotion, we get a little pumped up. I think that also because we were raised in that environment we were a little bit quarantined…wish I could come up with a different word for that one…sheltered from a sense of style and in some ways the same way that our live performance has been a leg up, I think our songwriting was, in a way, set back until recently. I think we figured out something about songwriting. Paul has written my favorite songs of his on this record and it’s the first time that I’ve lyrically contributed anything that I was really proud of. Overall, a dull answer is that we just distorted stuff more and that was really fun.

We know you take great pride in your life performance. Any sneak peeks you can give us as to what your live show will be like on this cycle?

DK: We’re playing eight to nine new songs every night on this tour that we’re currently on. We start with a new song and end with a new song. We’ve been playing these smaller clubs on this tour but the plan is in the spring to do a big blow out tour of the states. We’ll do like a New Orleans little march starting in our bus, we’ll come in through the front door. It creates a good vibe going through the crowd like that, it gets them moving. It’s a fun way to start the show. Then we got his organ, that’s a big addition and I feel like a very big improvement to our live show. Paul is shredding it, really playing the hell out of it.