Quiet Science | “Louder Than Words”
By Joanna Lugo

hen one ponders upon the intricacies of techno or technologically driven music… Let’s get real; one usually doesn’t ponder such intricacies. Yet if we were to dissect the distinct sound of the synthesizer, we might parallel it with somewhat surface level topics such as your current feelings for a significant other, memories of high school adventures, or general feelings of enjoyment. However, this sort of stereotypical musical association does not occur in Quiet Science’s new album entitled Dark Words On Dark Wings. Rather, the trio of experience-driven musicians open up discussions of intimate issues through dispersion of organic and mechanical elements within their developed lyrics and style. As is evident in the following discussion with front man Nathan Walters, Quiet Science has no specific formula to life other than to seek the Kingdom, no matter what.

Can you take some time to describe and interpret the overall concept and intent of Dark Words On Dark Wings?

Nathan Walters: I’m a pretty big Sci-Fi Fantasy person as everyone else in the band is. In most stories the good guy or the hero, the person who fights for what is right and what is just, always gets glory at the end. I mean, there’s struggles, but it always works out in the end. Sometimes things don’t always go bad for him the whole time, it’s just like this constant upward slope of success after success. I just think Dark Words on Dark Wings is kind of like… The context of it is in some of the books I read in fantasy. They have these ravens that deliver messages and when it’s bad news they always say, ‘Oh dark words on dark wings.’ In society today, whether it’s working with the band or working where I work, you just see a lot of people who aren’t really doing the will of God or trying to do the will of God or trying to abide by not only God’s commandments, but not even trying to be what the world views as a good person. And you see them succeed over and over again and sometimes it just gets frustrating. What the album is about is it’s a fight song. I mean there’s so many of these songs, in any sense a different story, when someone’s just going through something, and the concept of this album is what if there’s no glory for doing what is right? What if no one pats you on the back for doing what is right? What if the reward for doing this is death? What if the reward for doing this is imprisonment? Would you still do it? I think it’s something a lot of people can identify with, especially for Christians. While I was writing lyrics for this I just heard stories of people who are being burned alive or killed in other countries just for being Christian. And they still said that they were Christians even though they knew what it meant, not only death but a painful death. Here in America, a Christian country, if you ask anyone, most people are Christians but when it comes down to it so many Christians that I talk to say, ‘Oh well I believe this part of the bible,’ or ‘I believe this, not so much this,’ compromising or being wishy-washy about it. For me that’s just like, okay well if you’re faced with death or if you were faced with punishment for believing this, you don’t seem like you would believe it enough. Like why would you stand up and die for something if you’re not really entirely sold on it? And that’s what this album is about. It’s just like even if you never see anything good come of it here, it’s worth fighting for. And we just wanted to instill that spirit in people. We’re doing what’s right. We’re doing what we’re called to be doing and whether no one gets it or whether people come against you, whether you live a hard life, keep at it. Keep fighting through that struggle.

That reminds me of that line that says, “I live and die for Him.” Does that kind of sum up the album, just that verse right there? That phrase is just kind of sticking out to me right now with your explanation.

NW: Yeah. Pretty much. I mean the visual of that song is like we’re fighting this battle defending this town and we’re outnumbered, we know we’re going to loose but we’re still fighting. And it’s not to get Christians to be like ‘oh yeah violence.’ It’s not that kind of fight. But it’s like yes when it looks like there’s no hope, there’s no glory at the end, there’s no guaranteed victory and that there is but just in the story. Its like, would you still fight? And the character is dying and he says the way to glory is death, you know, fighting for what is right. And I’m proud to have lived the way I did and I’m proud to have died the way I did. Yeah so that line wraps up the entire meaning and purpose of the album.

So thinking about your background and your job of dealing with these really tough situations, these really kind of disturbed and distorted hearts that are just confused. So I think of the song 17-23 and when I listen to it I think about how you worked on those suicide watches. Can you talk a little bit about this idea of the burden of life and what you mean in that song when you’re requesting death and just really counting that as a joy to be requesting that death?

“…I think there’s just this hatred for God, this blame laid at His feet when stuff like that happens. And the switch of I would rather be dead than have this happen to me, what you have done by letting me live is actually worse than I could possibly imagine. Why would you let me live?”NW: Oh yeah. Well, you know, I haven’t had someone with this exact problem of them losing their limbs or something but I’ve had so many conversations with adults and children, because I worked on adolescents too where I’ve had people who have been burned by their boyfriend or girlfriend. I’ve had children that I talk to whose parents molested them and then the state kind of controls their destiny and their raised by other kids and the kids are mean to them. I mean I fought my life with that growing up (?) and I give my testimony a lot when we play. And then I’ve talked to them about that before and they say ‘how can you even say…’ or they say ‘can you tell me this story’ and then they say ‘tell me where God was in all of that, tell me that God loves me after I’ve told you all the things that have happened to me.’ In life there’s just so much. In the beginning God gave us the choice and things happen, but it’s the consequence of sin. Most of the time I’ve found someone who has been molested will go on to molest. And it’s something they hate but it’s something they end up doing. You know I’ve had people who have been in car accidents and they hit their head and things are never the same again and they just blame God and their just like ‘why would you let this happen to me? I would rather be dead than have my life be a way this happened.’ And that’s what the girls does in the song. She’s like I would rather be dead than be a cripple. And in that song she kind of takes on my kind of persona because when I was growing up… I always believed in Him. I never just said I don’t believe in Him anymore but I was mad at Him for letting my life go the way it had. And I think there’s just this hatred for God, this blame laid at His feet when stuff like that happens. And the switch of I would rather be dead than have this happen to me, what you have done by letting me live is actually worse than I could possibly imagine. Why would you let me live? And when I was initially writing the song it was going to be longer, which is the problem with all of our songs is I want to tell this long story and I only have a certain amount of time. It’s always hard to try to be the voice of God. When God speaks to you, when God gives you peace, or when God talks to you for the first time, what He says is so amazing that it’s hard to match that for someone else when you don’t know the specific thing. God’s speaking through you. And in the end that’s the last chorus, me trying to be the voice of God talking back to them. And what they’re saying is ‘where were you?’ And He’s just saying ‘I’m right here, I’ve always been here.’ Because that’s the way it happened for me. As angry as I was at Him, when I met Him again, for the first time looking back on my life I saw every instance He was there. I saw every instance He was doing things on my behalf when I wasn’t even asking, wasn’t even looking and was currently blaming Him for not being there. And I really felt like no songs are really aimed at people who go through it that hard because that doesn’t sell (?). And that’s one thing that we wanted to do with DWODW. There are people out there who are just hurting and not all the songs are being sung about hurt. Hurt doesn’t really get to these people’s hearts because it’s not as much hurt as they feel. They can’t identify with it because it’s not this huge thing. Working on a suicide watch unit, that’s our goal. We wanted to just put this album of people hurting and showing that there is hope that God is still there.

Stories of just these broken people. That reminds me of when Paul says, “I do the very thing that I hate.” I feel like we all go through those types of struggles where you recognize the sin and you identify the hatred that you have for it but for some reason, because of our flesh and because we’re sinners, we kind of end up replicating that sin in some form in our life.

NW: Right.

A question geared more towards the lyricism. It seems you tend to utilize these elements in nature such as dust, sand, and gardens. And then on the other end, as opposed to the organic elements, you have more of these man-made qualities like when you talk about the streets or the buildings or castles; kind of this juxtaposition of organic and man-made elements. Why do you choose to use that juxtaposition? Is it because you’re conveying emotion, you’re conveying relationship, or why is it that you use both these elements to convey your story?

NW: I think it comes from reading. I think that everything has a setting in books and the setting just helps add to the emotion that you’re trying to depict. I think that helps a lot, but honestly I do know that I use that kind of stuff. Like the dust storm, it just kind of fit perfectly. I remember talking to a girl at a youth group once and she was talking about her parents getting divorced and she was just saying kind of like being blown around in the wind. And people describe these feelings to me and I just picture a dust storm. And I write this song and it becomes about a dust storm. That becomes the way I’m going to draw this picture of this story.

So you’re just kind of authoring these stories in your lyrics.

NW: Yeah.

I have made this observation that it feels like there is this organic quality to it but then there is this man-made essence because you are using the synthesizer and you are using all of these technological devices to create these images. How do you capture those metaphors musically?

NW: For most of the songs the other band members didn’t even hear my singing melody and they didn’t hear the words before I sang them to record them. Some of the things we added in the studio just kind of came together so perfectly. I like electronic music; obviously we have synthesizer and stuff. There’s techno and that kind of is for joy or happiness. But I think it’s for some reason kind of hard to do this entirely electronic thing that really helps to depict the whole range of emotions like sadness or anger, because I feel like sometimes with just electronic stuff you’re confined. Sometimes there’s just a wind blowing, which I feel in the beginning of Dust Storm it just gives you this empty feeling in the beginning. And then using screams and voices kind of helps balance it out a little bit so that the humanity in, us that we’re addressing, kind of comes across in the music too. It’s almost like I’m telling a story but we’re painting a picture and the picture has to fit the emotion of the story. It all has to go together perfectly, which you know it’s bad that it comes out that way but we were pretty pleased with the way it turned out this time.

How do you feel Quiet Science has changed or progressed since the conception of your last album, With/Without into DWODW?

NW: We took a long time to record that album, not like in the studio, just over time writing songs because of budget. We kept replacing numbers touring so by the time it came out we already had the concept for DWODW; we were already working on it. We went through so many bassists we decided let’s just try to do this without a bassist. And that kind of helped DWODW musically because we had to be like okay now these songs have to know whether they’re driving or whether they’re like this… let’s come up with some more creative ways rather than bass. Like sometimes we have low strings, sometimes we have low synth. And that was a challenge to write the songs to make them with different kind of bass sounds. But it also, I think, gives it more of a personality. You don’t have tons of fans who are trying to be like let’s just make music that we want to write. And we had been in another band, obviously together, we weren’t really able to be as creative as we wanted to be. With/Without was where we got to lay out on guitars so we were really excited with that. Coming up with the concept for DWODW… the art on the album was done by a friend, the stories are darker, I mean even to the stage, writing, what we wear, the whole thing is more closely tied to us and our interests. We’re definitely into sci-fi type stuff and I think DWODW, every aspect of it is a little bit closer to the real us than With/Without was. I remember when With/Without came out we really liked the album. We were like ‘how are we gonna beat this?’ I mean I think this is a great album and now that Dark Words is coming out we’re like ‘oh this is way better than that one.’

So I guess I want to delve into the concept of identity. You seem to reference a lack of it when you mention the painting without the eyes, an absence of color, standing in the dark, or even the idea of shadows: these words that signify an absence of something. So if you could just talk a little bit about that concept of identity or lack of it.

NW: With the absence of color, and darkness, and shadows, I just really think that it’s a simple way to describe something as either being bad or try to have someone’s emotion being obviously the person is going through something. I deal with a lot of depressed people and when I think of depression I think of grey. There’s not a lot of ups and downs there’s this like… you’re done, you’re tired. And I just picture the world more colorless. Living life without hope just seems so bleak. And all those things are just trying to depict this bleakness because when I was growing up I wasn’t a happy kid. I was very mad at God and I had up and down days. After the change that God brought me, and this is my own thing, but I don’t even like visiting the town that I used to live in. And I’ve gotten better but at first I didn’t even like visiting the town that I lived in as that person. I tell people I just feel like when it comes to this town a cloud surrounds the town and it’s almost like the reminder of who I was. It’s almost like the reminder that all these people know me as this other person who I hate, who wasn’t even me, that person wasn’t even me. Through all the stories that I tell they are closely tied to me or they are closely tied to someone I love. I’m telling a story that I may have a character in it and it may not be that I went through the same thing but I know the pain. I just want to describe these feelings to these people and match them so that they can say I feel like that, so that when I offer the way out, when I offer the hope that they say ‘well this may work for me because he described how I feel and if this can change their life, and God can do this for Him, maybe He can do it for me.’

What does being an independent band mean to you and what can we expect from Quiet Science in the future?

NW: It means work. I have people tell me ‘so when did you start making money?’ I was like, if that’s what you’re in a band for bro, stop now. We love music. We feel God’s called us to do this. We feel like we have a message. If we didn’t have anything to say in a song we definitely would not be doing music because it’s hard being an independent band. You work so you can pay to go on the road. And we were out 150 days at least for the past two years. Kickstarter came around. That kind of helped us fund the album but it really only covered about a third of the album. And it gets pretty rough. I tell people if you want to do music you better be ready to run a small business ‘cause that’s what you’re doing is running a small business. My manager was like “Hey are you excited about that album coming out?” And I was like no, I get excited after the album comes out because up to then it’s just work. I have deadlines, I’m calling these people ‘cause I need these tracked. I need the art done. It’s hard, but we also get to control. Like if we were selling to them, we’re like “Yeah we want to have this dark album that kind of doesn’t really hit any target market, you know like we have a Christian message for people who are really depressed.” That’s what it is. Numbers, we can sell with that. We get to control that. That’s cool. But in the future what you can expect from Quiet Science… you know, I don’t know. We’ve been playing DWODW for so long and finally getting to see it come out and getting to set up everything the way we want it; we’re totally excited about it. I don’t know what we’ll do next but I definitely think that you can expect to hear a lot more from us. We’ve been around for a while. We plan to be around for a little while longer. Things may get weirder in the next album, maybe even darker, who knows? We’ll see what happens. But we’re just taking it a day at a time.