Hoobastank – Interview [2002]

Who the hell is Hoobastank? Find out!

How’s life?

Just trying to stay healthy. I’ve got a bit of a cold.

What’ve you been up to?

We just got home from touring last week. I thought we’d have some time off but we’ve been really busy. We just shot a video.

Was that your first video?

Yeah it was.

What was that experience like?

It was so cool. Just seeing stuff on film is amazing, it’s so much better than video. Our bass player tweaked his knee so bad and we were doing the same song for like six hours and I started cramping up. I got smacked in the face with the bass, and the very last take I couldn’t stand because my legs were cramping so bad so I was singing from my knees. There is one part of the song where I popped up really fast and the camera was on a crane above me and I wacked my head. I hit the floor and got a big old welt, it was great.

I always hear that it takes like forever to do a video. How do you keep the intensity?

I know. It’s insane. At the end I basically knocked myself out and I’m lying on the floor and writhing around. It kind of looks funny though.

How did you get signed?

Our first show ever was in June of ’95 and we got signed in August of 2000. We submitted a demo in like ’98 and no one bit on it. We tried going that route, but we already had a pretty substantial following and just concentrated on songwriting.

I think the whole sending out a demo thing to a label is the biggest misconception in the world. No one gets signed like that anymore.

It’s true. I go into the offices and I see those demos, no one cares. It’s all word of mouth. It’s the most stereotypical thing. You still need a demo, but it’s not how you are going to get a label’s attention.

When you were sending the demos out, was the material different on it?

Yeah. Early on we were had a funkier deal. We had some sax players. It was like a heavy Oingo Boingo. It was as much straightforward rock. Then we started doing stuff that sounded like Mr. Bungle. The songs have gotten more and more to the point.

Was the idea of getting more to the point about getting signed?

At first I didn’t really know what getting signed was. We were playing club gigs and it was so much fun because our friends came out and people we didn’t know. We didn’t have a clue how the music industry worked. We didn’t even want to know how it worked. We released our own demo in ’98, on that cd you can see a lot of growth.

How did the change in style happen?

I was never a huge fan of the horns anyways. It’s something my guitar player was really into because he’s a huge Chili Pepper and Fishbone fan, so he is into this funky wild shit.

Even the Chili Peppers bailed on that.

Right, and there wasn’t one band that I just listened to that had horns, I’ve never liked them.

Me either.

When we started off we had such funky shit, but he was the most experienced guy. But I was always into heavier music, like Pantera to Tool, more rock stuff. We had a hard time, I couldn’t get the guitar player to step on the distortion, but slowly it started changing and I took a more active roll in writing. Actually everyone but the guitar player was into heavier stuff. At this point I felt like we were writing music for the kids and it wasn’t gratifying. It got the crowd going and that was it. One day I brought it up that we had to get rid of the horns because it wasn’t working. At this time we were writing music where there were no parts for the horns. The guitar, bass, and drums always came first. Our sax player never showed up for rehearsal because he was this really talented musician, so he didn’t have to show up really. But he had an ego and didn’t want to practice, so he’d come to practice once before a show and learn the parts. So we’d write all this music and the song would be done and then we’d sit there and be like, ‘Damn, we’ve got to write sax for this now?’ I mean, we did this for like a year or two. So we put in these sax parts just because, not to make the song better but because he was in the band. So after a while we knew that if we were going to do it right we had to do it for the music, not the guilt.

Listening to the album, I’m wondering if all the tracks are written in a similar time period? It seems like “Better” sounds different.

Like “Crawling In The Dark”, we wrote it two days before we went into the studio during pre-production. I was really stoked by that song. We actually had so many songs to choose from. It was great. There are three songs that are almost two years old, but most were writing from the time we got signed until February.

Was this studio experience different?

We used the same producer we used for the demo, Jim Wirt. We never had the time to really get into the trenches with him. We just would go in before and lay something down. But this time we had ten weeks to work and could really get in there and work. At this point we were already thinking like him with songs and we’d be like, ‘We don’t need this part or this one,’ and by the time the song got to him he was like, ‘This is great. Let’s just do it like that.’

It’s got to be exciting for you right now.

It is, but it’s also so weird. There are so many requests for our time. And each request is important and it’s like every fifteen minutes is scheduled. Sometimes I sit there and I’m like, ‘Why do people even want to talk to me?’ It’s strange but it’s cool. I can’t wipe the smile off my face.

+ charlie craine