Standing In The Rain
Hier ein Interview über die Entstehung von Standing in the rain, Studioaufnahmen etc
Formed in 1999, Billy Talent is one of the few bands to take hardcore punk, polish it up and still make it sound dirty enough to appeal to diehard punk fans. After a year of touring alongside The Buzzcocks and major league rockers on Lollapalooza, their latest self-titled record was released in September on Atlantic Records. Life In A Bungalo got the chance to speak with vocalist Ben Kowalewicz during some downtime on their US tourormed in 1999, Billy Talent is one of the few bands to take hardcore punk, polish it up and still make it sound dirty enough to appeal to diehard punk fans. After a year of touring alongside The Buzzcocks and major league rockers on Lollapalooza, their latest self-titled record was released in September on Atlantic Records. Life In A Bungalo got the chance to speak with vocalist Ben Kowalewicz during some downtime on their US tour.
One of the highlights of your album is Standing In The Rain, which doesn’t seem to get mentioned much in the press. What were you thinking when you wrote that song?
A lot of people don’t like that song. We were recording our album in Vancouver, a very big port city where a lot of drugs flow—especially heroin. There’s a small area of about four blocks that is the most polluted, desolate area that has just been raped and pillaged by heroin. It’s almost hard to believe that it exists in North America. Prostitution and crime is also very high right by where we were recording. I remember walking, and I saw this girl. She was about my age, she was a prostitute, and it looked like the world had given up on her. It was weird, because I locked eyes with her, and saw her quite a few times. Ian wrote a song, and brought the music to Standing In The Rain. It was dirty, but beautiful and very hopeful and triumphant. While writing lyrics for it, I thought, “How did Sting ever write a song about prostitution without the stupid ’80s way of doing coke and banging hookers?” He wrote Roxanne in a very insightful sort of way. I went home for a couple days, and wrote Standing In The Rain with a napkin and a pen while flying back from Vancouver.
Did you ever talk to that girl?
No, I never actually spoke to her. A lot of times, being a singer and lyricist is very cool because one of the best ways I like writing is from the third person point of view. Just seeing her in her environment, and being there long enough to absorb it was enough.
On the opening track This Is How It Goes you hit these insane high notes, on par with a sloppy Bruce Dickinson—it really gets operatic—do you even care that it’s not clean? What were you thinking when you were pelting that out?
I have a really hard time in the studio. I don’t like studios. I think studios are not made for me. I like playing live, and I don’t think the music has to be perfect. If there is energy and emotion then that’s all that matters. The bands that blow my mind away are the ones that just don’t give a fuck. They are in that moment, and that moment is the only one that’s relevant to the people there. When you are in the studio you have to be very conscious of what you are singing and how you are singing. I like the finished product, but I don’t like the method. Some days I just didn’t feel it, and some days I would just walk in, hit record and bang! That’s what was great about our producer—even if we were in our 15th hour of overdubs, if I was able to sing, he would let me sing. The booth was always ready to roll. I think I sang most of the album back in Toronto, in a little shithole studio that wasn’t even a studio. I sang pretty much half the album in two days, after trying to do it for three weeks.
Your record definitely has a raw hardcore punk sound that hasn’t been heard since the mid-1990s. Who do you draw your influences from?
For me personally, I draw a lot of inspiration from all the older bands. Vocally, I love Perry Farrell from Jane’s Addiction, David Bowie, Robert Smith, even Kurt Cobain to Mike Patton. I draw a lot of influence from what my brother was listening to growing up, and then forced me to get into. So if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be listening to this kind of music at all.
Your vocal style is very different. It goes from singing to a screeching chorus of angry noise.
Ian, our guitar player, sings just about as much as I do. We have a lot of shouting vocals, and it’s a little bit of all of us—not just me. We do a lot of call and response harmonies, which are very Fugazi, Clash influenced. They say a line, then I say a line, and it all meets at the end.
Billy Talent has been lumped together with the so-called screamo genre. What modern bands do you identify with?
I like Thursday, and all those bands are out there doing what they do, but the funny thing about our band is that we have never really been accepted into any kind of scene. Growing up we played a lot of punk shows, hardcore shows, and ska shows. So we always were bouncing through all these different kinds of genres, and we made friends with all these different bands. There are all these bands that we really got along with, but we were never accepted by one scene. I think what we are trying to do is just write good songs, and let the music speak for itself. Whatever way you need to dip the aspirin in jam to digest it is fine. Surprisingly, we’ve never really played with any of the modern screamo bands. We’ve played with Boy Sets Fire, Sparta, Mars Volta and The Blood Brothers, but we’ve never actually had a tour with one of the newer emo/hardcore bands.
Your moniker is taken from a character in a book that becomes a huge Canadian punk rock star and then crashes hard. Do you think your band is cursed to go that route, because of your name?
How it came to be, was I had seen the movie version of “Hard Core Logo,” and we were looking for a band name. The guy that played Billy Talent is my favorite Canadian actor Callum Keith Rennie, and not even thinking about what the character did (sell out and go to a major label) we just thought it was a cool name. It was Canadian, and we like the Ziggy Stardust thing, where the band’s name is a real name.
Any worries that down the line people are going to start calling you Billy like they do to the lead singer of Jimmy Eat World?
That happens already. People chant “Billy” when they see me, but we did put in the liner notes that Billy Talent is a fictional character from a book. All of our names are also in the notes, which is kind of lame as well. I can relate to the guy from Jimmy Eat World—poor bastard.The Buzzcocks and major league rockers on Lollapalooza, their latest self-titled record was released in September on Atlantic Records. Life In A Bungalo got the chance to speak with vocalist Ben Kowalewicz during some downtime on their US tour.
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