The Minor Times – Tim Leo And Brendan McAndrew
Posted on July 24, 2007 at 8:00 am by admin
Guitarist Tim Leo and vocalist Brendan McAndrew were kind enough to answer some questions I had through e-mail.
Way Too Loud: I haven’t read anyone ask you the meaning behind your name yet, so I’m hoping you don’t get asked about it very often. Will you get away with letting me ask?
Tim Leo (guitar): It’s one of those questions that everyone in the band would answer differently. “The Minor Times” is a name we came up with for a possible song title in our old band…simply put, I think we spend most of our lives behind a public personality. I’ve always had a hard time getting my point across verbally (take this answer for instance), and I liked the idea of a band name that represents that 30 minutes or so of absolute honesty you get through music. It’s also ambiguous enough, we could all get behind it. We’ve never been the kind of band that we want people to easily define, and what we call ourselves, like it or not plays a big part in that. Plus, our other ideas were really, really bad.
WTL: Does “Summer Of Wolves” have an overall theme or concept behind it, such as in previous efforts, or are the songs much more individual?
Brendan McAndrew (vocals): A lot on despair and paranoia. Everything kind of expands from there. People often assume everything is based on anger, which I find to be really off base, especially for this record. I’d like to think there’s a lot more someone can take away from the lyrics than just that.
“The Pugilist At Work“ off of Making Enemies comes off to nearly everyone as this very aggressive and violent song. When we were writing it, we were talking about these crazy situations we’ve all had when you’re on the brink of a physical fight. Your heart‘s pounding and your ears are ringing, someone pushes you and for one reason or another, you keep cool and how destructive that can be. Over and over, thinking back on how you wish you would have reacted is worse than just getting beat up. “The Pugilist At Work“ is a ‘this is how I tell myself it would’ve happened‘ story.
WTL: I have to say, my favorite song is “This Is The Blues”. How did that song come about with the 70’s styled keyboards and the na-na-na-nas at the end? I want to know so much more about that song! From what inspired it, to what the lyrics are about, to if you’ll do anything like the ending portion of that song again.
Tim: The short of it is this: we had this other riff, a whole other song that was never going to be used for anything. My brother had written this elaborate intro that we would do live, some of which is used at the beginning of the song. We kind of burnt out on the intro and we wanted to change it up and do something new and Matt [Leo, bassist] thought that this “unusable” song, rearranged slightly, fit the melody of “blues.” He worked on it a little bit on the piano and we decided on an outro. We had a very loose idea of what it should sound like and he ran with it in the studio. We all got involved and it was a lot of fun. Some of us don’t listen to any “heavy” music outside of this and we’ve always tried to creatively incorporate some of those influences…but we wanted to do it really well. The high pitched melody throughout is actually a distorted piano and the end “record skipping guitar” melody is a cut up surf riff we recorded in our practice place. We were all really happy with how the song turned out, it changed with every take into it’s own thing.
Brendan: Lyrically, the song’s about lying. Lying and guilt - A pretty general blues song.
WTL: People have been throwing technical jargon at bands for a few years now. Does the idea of how technical, or how simple you’re playing is even enter your mind? The Minor Times strikes me as a band that’s more interested in the song at the end of the day rather than the skill level involved, whether it be easy or hard.
Tim: No, you’ve got it man. I couldn’t possibly be less interested in how technical our band, or any other band is for that matter. There’s nothing heavy about a bunch of guys running scales and playing rudiments. There’s no emotion, and I have a hard time finding the creativity. It’s like standing in a guitar center. We are not, and never really were a tech band. We’ve been playing together long enough that we know our sound and we know what sounds good. We’ve always been more interested in creating rhythm and tones, working on how a song will sonically progresses and apply those ideas to a chaotic and noisy structure.
That said, I’ve found some of our more wide-open songs can be difficult in their own way. It doesn’t matter if you pull off a fraction early or if your guitar is slightly out of tune when you’re playing dissonant chords at 120 beats per minute. We’ve been stripping things down to more single notes and interesting chords. It’s a lot of fun, we have to play more off of each other and think of our instruments as part of the whole picture.
WTL: Everything in the world of The Minor Times seems to be growing. You’ve hopped around to different labels, getting progressively “bigger” (in relative terms of course). Do you have any bigger aspirations for The Minor Times beyond playing music, and making more of it?
Tim: I speak for us all when I say we’ve resigned ourselves to the fact that we’re playing unpopular music. That we’ve gotten this far is amazing to me. We’re doing a 7 inch for Relapse which is a label that we’ve all always had a lot of respect for, that’s pretty awesome. Prosthetic has been great to us and we’re going to have the opportunity to do some more US touring. We really want to hit Europe sometime before we throw in the proverbial towel. And like I said, I‘m thankful that we’ve gotten as far as we have and lasted as long as we have without killing each other.
WTL: Do you still play material from your older releases?
Tim: When we play in our home town and the mood strikes us we play some older songs. W‘ve beaten those songs into the ground. “Albert Desalvo” and “Nevada”…we wrote those songs in 1999 – 2000 and burnt out on them. We still bang around some songs from Making Enemies here and there.
It should be said, we don’t really think about what songs the audience wants to hear when we play out, and we tend to play shorter sets. Typically, The Minor Times are not the band that’s drawing kids. It ends up making us look like assholes and pissing off the few people that actually came out to see us. I know it and i don’t really like it, but it’s the nature of the band I guess.
WTL: I have to be honest, I’ve always wanted to see bands playing special tracks that only appeared on some sort of compilation or rare EP, or something live, just make the fans wonder where that song is from. Do you ever do that, or is there a chance in the future?
Tim: We’re really into these songs we’re writing for the Relapse 7 inch. It’s going to be a very limited release, but we’ll probably play those songs out anyway. Because they rule.
WTL: Is there a future for your old material? Perhaps releasing all of your old material together on one record? I’m always bummed when a band leaves their past behind completely.
Tim: We’ve never really thought about it, I guess. We’ve spent so much time with our songs, it would be nice to not have them die out. People have incredibly short attention spans, though…we’ll see.
The Official The Minor Times Website
The Minor Times At MySpace
The Minor Times At Prosthetic Records
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