Nelsonville: Interview with The Men
By Megan Fair, Copy Chief
In the bright sun of Nelsonville Music Festival Day 2, ACRN met up with noisy Brooklyn four-piece The Men. After finding a nice shady and secluded porch to take over, the dry-humored and sarcastic clan chatted about all things The Men, from violent viruses and public vomiting to revisiting old sounds. They even told ACRN about their upcoming and super exclusive live banter album. The four-piece, made up of bassist Kevin Faulker, vocalist and guitarist Mark Perro, drummer Rich Samis and vocalist and guitarist Nick Chiericozzi, as well as sound technician, unofficial fifth member and friend Kyle Keays, were certainly full of entertaining conversation.
How are you guys enjoying Nelsonville?
Kevin Faulkner: We haven’t been here very long.
Mark Perro: We just got here at like 2 o’clock.
Rich Samis: Somebody said there’s a Quiznos here. Is that true? Somebody said Nelsonville’s like a Quiznos...
[All laugh]
MP: Maybe their headquarters?
[Editor’s Note: There are actually no Quiznos in a 50 mile radius of Columbus]
I honestly have no idea, I’ll have to look it up for you while we’re here.
MP: We were at Bob Evan’s corporate headquarters before. [All laugh] That was in Columbus though.
So, what are you guys most looking forward to about playing today and the lineup today in particular?
Nick Chiericozzi: Steve Gunn, Kurt Vile, Dinosaur Jr. But I don’t think we’ll get to watch Dinosaur Jr.’s set, because we have to set up.
MP: Maybe we can catch a little bit, maybe a couple songs. We want to be louder than Dinosaur Jr. though [All laugh, Mark nods at sound technician across the porch] Yeah Yeah [nickname for Kyle Keays] does our sound. [Porch hysterically laughs at the name Yeah Yeah.] He’ll make us louder than Dinosaur Jr.
Everyone will hear you and migrate over.
MP: Yeah, that’s the idea.
A lot of times people ask you about your sound in particular, which has changed a good bit, but what dynamically has changed within the band since formation in 2008?
RS: 2008?! [All laugh]
MP: I mean, we’ve had a lot of lineup changes, in 2008 we were a two-piece, it was just me and Nick at the time. And we’ve gone from a two-piece to a three-piece to a four-piece to a five-piece, and now we’re actually back to a four-piece. This is our first--this is gonna be our second show as a four-piece, Ben [Greenburg] is no longer in the band. So that’s kind of the newest change.
Creatively, when you’re changing from a two-piece to a three-piece to a four-piece, does the creative process stay the same? Is the writing process the same, just with more hands on it?
NC: I think the newest record was the most different, writing wise, because we kind of wrote separately, and brought, each person brought a song and we just did it all, mostly together. So that was a little different.
MP: With most of New Moon that stuff wasn’t even done yet, so it was just a polar extreme from Tomorrow’s Hits. With Tomorrow’s Hits, people would bring in kind of close to finished ideas and we would just kind of act as the band, which was kind never really how we had done it before.
In an interview somewhere, you had previously mentioned that it was touring and traveling that influenced your change in sound. What were the places or people that influenced that change the most?
MP: Who said that? [Seemingly fake-outraged, all laugh]
RS: I probably said that. [Laughs]
Yeah Yeah/Kyle Keays: I think it was probably you guys finding what you didn’t want to be a part of, like adjusting after your first time at [SXSW]. You know what I mean?
KF: That’s a good point, No No. [Laughter]
MP: We tried a lot of things instrumentally in different instruments and different set ups. Yeah, taking it out on the road’s an easy way to figure out if it’s working or not working, and I think we learned some things don’t--I mean we try a lot of stuff and some of works and some of it doesn’t work. I don’t know if there’s any particular place or anything that had anything to do with it. Being on the road doesn’t really help creativity, it doesn’t inspire a new creativity as much as maybe shows illustrate was is working and what isn’t working. Understand that new ideas aren’t coming when you’re sitting in a van for 12 hours, you know?
When you guys are playing live, since each album sounds so different. What’s the set up now? Are you playing old stuff or is it almost all new, Tomorrow’s Hits kind of stuff?
NC: It’s mostly old, this set. Like we’re not playing anything off the new album. [Laughter] So we kind of went back and revisited stuff, in fact, like songs that we never really worked out, songs that worked when we recorded them. Stuff from like our first album we only played a handful of times. Because I think what happens is that the really easy songs we tended to use more, but going back and revisiting things is kind of cool, because we used to use a lot of different tunings on that first album it was all kind of weird tunings, so we’re kind of converting that to a two-guitar standard tuning kind-of-thing, which is fresh and new, as opposed to the cinematic kind of qualities of the earlier albums. Yeah, it’s all older stuff for tonight.
That’s exciting! In terms of choosing to playing older songs tonight, are you tired of the new material or were you just ready to bring some of it back?
NC: It’s the new lineup, without Ben, so we were like, “Maybe we should go back and play some [old] stuff,” because we had to get this together four weeks ago, so we were like, we know what we have and let’s try and retool that.
How do you develop your musicianship to get to the point where you can switch gears so easily? Like, “We’ve been doing this, but we’re going to revisit a style we haven’t played in a while.”
NC: I’m not getting any better at guitar. [Everyone laughs] I’m not improving.
MP: I think a lot of it’s necessity, we’re like, “Alright we had a change recently, now we gotta figure out something to do,” so we just do it. I guess that’s kind of always been our m.o., we’ll just not worry about it. [Pauses] Which maybe we should worry about it, have worried a little more about it if we could pull it off properly, but in theory--we’re always just willing to try new things and try different things. And that’s what we were saying before, you learn that things don’t work and then you realize you maybe shouldn’t have tried it out in front of a whole ton of people, maybe you should have tried it out at practice first [Laughter]. You know.
In particular, what are the bands that are fueling your inspiration right now, or rather what are you listening to right now?
MP: Dwight Twilley...The Dicks...
RS: That was two hours ago! [All crack up] That’s what we were listening to today [Still laughing].
MP: We were trying to listen to Eddie Murphy earlier.
Are you going to have an Eddie Murphy inspired album next?
MP: Yes, a comedy album, maybe.
RS: I heard this Bill Cosby funk song the other day, that was pretty funny. Wasn’t that with some jazz dude or something?
NC: What is it?!
RS: Some Bill Cosby funk song!
KF: He’s got that drug album.That was pretty sick!
MP: Cosby, Rock, Sandler, Murphy, C.K. [All laughing]
So your next album is going to be a comedy album.
RS: Yes, a live banter album! Just live banter. Double. Double CD, Double LP but they’re both going to be flexi discs.
You already answered my next question: what is your new music going to sound like?
[Laughter]
So, since you’ve had a recent lineup change, are you writing or working on anything or are you more focused on taking a break from that?
NC: We’re kind of just getting ready for the summer, for these quick little weekend runs that we’re doing, This is a three day tour. Then we’ll see what happens. Hopefully we’ll have some stuff written.
Out of my own curiosity, has having a name like ‘The Men’ affected your visibility in a digital age where search engine optimization is everything?
RS: My favorite is my Uncle Rich always tells me this story. Like right when I started playing with this band, he’s like, [Uncle Rich impression] “So your mom says Google ‘The Men Brooklyn,’ and, uh, Rich, I don’t wanna tell you what I found.” [Everyone laughs heartily]
So sometimes there are some mixups?
RS: I think he was referring to naked men. [Everyone cracks up]
MP: I mean, there’s a bunch of bands that have used the name before. We never really thought about it too much. We’re just kind of doing our thing. We’ve been around; people have found it.
NC: When people visit our blog, it says, “You visited this page many times.” [Laughing]
RS: Think about this...John Lennon never Googled it. [Laughter] So stick that in your pipe and smoke it!
What do you guys do when you aren’t touring or writing music?
RS: Google my own name. [Laughter]
NC: [Kevin’s] a cool photographer.
RS: I do a lot of screen printing, always last minute.
MP: I was just posed as a medical patient at a clinic, and they had med students do physicals on me. [Laughter].
KF: No jaundice? [Laughs]
MP: I had like six physicals done.
They just really wanted to make sure you were healthy.
MP: Well, they were learning, and someone was observing and critiquing them, and they were just sort of using me as a chalkboard kind of. [Laughter.]
Was it a good experience?
MP: [Laughs] No, it was horrible. I got a free sandwich though! And a couple bucks, so it was alright.
KF: That’s a good deal!
So, kind of related to that, what don’t people know about The Men? What would people be surprised to know?
RS: Us personally, or us as a band?
MP: Either?
Both or either.
RS: I don’t know guys...what do you think? Should we tell her? [Laughter]
MP: What do you mean, what we were talking about before? [More laughter]
RS: Should we tell these guys?! [Referencing Editorial Director Zack Baker and friend]
KF: I have no idea.
MP: Yeah, I don’t know!
RS: I can’t think of anything witty to say. Or true.
What is something untrue that people don’t know about you? What would you tell people if you wanted to impress them?
RS: Once I donated $4,000 to a Nigerian prince, via Craigslist [laughter]. But he never paid me back!
That’s a bummer.
RS: Yeah it sucks! I was so excited. “Greetings from a prince in Nigeria!” [Laughs.] Well something that is true is on the last tour, most of us and our friend’s band all got the same stomach virus [laughs].
MP: Yeah, I’d say the last day of the tour and the day after, we all went down. Violently, violently ill. I got rushed to the hospital, but only because I was driving when I got sick. Everyone has a pretty funny story about when they got sick. Like I was in a car on the highway and had a panic attack. Just getting sick when you don’t want to get sick, not necessarily in a place you want to get sick and then finding out everyone else is also sick was pretty funny.
Was it from food?
KF: No, we all ate different food.
MP: It had to have been a virus. We were all trading pictures of our saltines and Gatorade table spreads.
RS: [Our friend] was texting us like, “Holy fuck!” just because of how much he was throwing up. I got sick in public, I was going to my friend’s show, and I started to feel the stomach thing coming on. So I made myself throw up, and I was like, “Man, it’s nothing, I’ll just go to the show.” But then I was like, “I can’t do this,” because I was throwing up all through this big strip mall thing, probably like three or four blocks, just like [demonstrates hurling sounds and actions].
KF: Oh my God, where?
RS: Fourth Street Mall, and then I went to this 7/11. And if you’re sick, never go to a 7/11, because it’s a bad place. I was throwing up in the bathroom, a lot of public throwing up.
KF: It was a good time.
Were you at least making it to trash cans?
RS: No, just on the street. It was the day I got back, mostly after not being around for two months, so I was just [vomiting] hoping I would run into someone I knew.
Yeah Yeah/KK/No No: That was great.
MP: Yeah, Kyle was fine!
Maybe he poisoned you!
Yeah Yeah/KK/No No: No, I had enough poison in my blood. [Everyone laughs].
KF: The virus was like, “I’m outta here, I cannot survive in this man’s body.” [Laughs].
Today, since you aren’t playing new things, what are you hoping for from the crowd. Do you think the crowd will be surprised?
KF: If they’re fans of just the new record they are going to be VERY surprised.
RS: I think it’ll be cool. It’ll be dark out. [Everyone laughs.]
What’s the perks of it being dark out?
RS: There’ll be no sun. It won’t be 90 degrees. I think it’s gonna be a good show! What do you think?
I’m excited to see it! I was interested to see what you would play, based on the variety of sounds you’ve put out. I had assumed you’d play only newer stuff, which would be cool, but I’m excited to experience the older music.
KF: Even when we play old stuff and the new stuff it all flows together fine, it’s not like it’s all over place.
