iNTERViEWED
BY BRiAN LUSH
With the pending release of their third album ‘PLAY THING’,
THE CRINGE have gotten down to business in terms of making their
oh-so-savvy
brand of power pop something that is going to stand out in today’s
musical
climate. The switch to a more serious approach to song craft can be
attributed
to the invaluable guidance and input from legendary producer STEVE
LILLYWHITE
(U2, DAVE MATTHEWS BAND) but the band’s front man and songwriter JOHN
CUSIMANO
and his band of dedicated
journeymen
deserve much of the credit. With ‘PLAY THING’, the band transcends both
power
pop and garage rock with the all out prog rock of POISON while the
first single
‘NO CONTROL’ will no doubt bring back a memory or two of SIAMESE
DREAM-era
SAMSHING PUMPKINS. For anyone out there whining that rock n roll ain’t
what it
used to be, THE CRINGE just might be the band that you want shuffled on
your
i-pod along with SOUNDGARDEN and MUDHONEY.
ROCKWIRED
spoke with JOHN CUSIMANO of THE CRINGE over the
phone. Here is how it went.
JUNE
8th
is quickly approaching. What’s all going through your head in terms of
the
impending release?
I’m trying to make sure that the team is assembled and that
everyone is doing what they need to do so that as many people know
about the
record as possible. This is obviously the toughest environment for
selling
records – ever probably.
Absolutely with the
internet coupled with the economy.
It is definitely easier to get a lot of different types of
music out there but it’s still hard to have a big hit or sell enough
records. I
don’t know if you’ve heard about the long tail theory. Let’s say you
have ten
bands – like the COLDPLAYS and the BRITNEY SPEARS’ of the world – and
they sell
millions and millions of records. They are the front of the tail and
that is a
very, very high spike. As it trails off you get to find any kind of
music you
want on the internet and you can be so genre specific that certain
bands and
certain types of music will find their ten fans and there are millions
of bands
like that that sell very few records. The key is to try to be towards
the front
of that tail.
Now that all the work
that has gone into making this CD is behind you, how do you feel about
the
finished work?
It’s hard to be objective about something that you’ve lived
with and worked on and written for a year or for however long it’s
been. I’m
trying to listen to it objectively in comparison to our last couple of
records
and I think this is definitely our most mature work. I think the
production
value is way up there and that has a lot to do with producer STEVE
LILLYWHITE.
The songwriting is really strong. We spent a tremendous amount of time
and got
really nit-picky and would argue for hours over the right sound or the
right
types of lyrics. We didn’t lay it down until everybody in the band was
happy
with it.
Talk about the
genesis of this band. How did it begin?
I’d been carrying around this name THE CRINGE with me since
probably high school. Me and a buddy started this band and back then it
was a
joke that we were so bad that we made you cringe. We had this punk rock
aesthetic. As a band, we’ve been together for about five or six years.
The line
up that I have now is the ultimate dream band that I’ve always wanted.
We’re
truly a band with four distinct units that work really well together.
We’re no
longer just a garage band with crappy songs and out of tune guitars.
Hopefully
we don’t make people cringe anymore.
How did music begin
for you?
I guess it began when I was six years old when I started taking
piano lessons. My father also taught me three chords on the guitar and
I taught
myself guitar from there and I never looked back. I took classical
piano
through elementary and junior high and in high school I got involved
with
playing in the jazz band. I also taught myself to play drums and bass.
I always
had bands in high school and I always had bands in college. I’ve been
big fan
of music. The first album that I ever listened to – when I was three
months old
- was SERGEANT
PEPPER.
What other music influenced
you?
First there was THE BEATLES and LED ZEPPELIN and all of the
classic rock stuff. THE WHO was a huge band for me. I felt that THE WHO
were
the complete package. They had punk rock attitude and fieriness. They
wrote pop
songs that had really catchy killer hooks. Live, they were this
unhinged but
massive stadium rock band. I really think they covered all of the
bases. Later
on I got into a lot of punk rock. THE RAMONES turned my world upside
down. They
made good music that was accessible. If you had the right attitude and
you put
all of your emotion and truthfulness behind it, you could be in a band too. That was
really what THE RAMONES
started. Pre-punk, there was THE VELVET UNDERGROUND which was huge for
me. It
was TODD RUNDGREN who said that only a thousand people heard THE VELVET
UNDERGROUND when they first came out but every single one of them
started a
band. IGGY AND THE STOOGES was another influence. They just got into
the ROCK
N’ ROLL HALL OF FAME which was fantastic.
Talk about each of the
members of the band and what it is that you think each of them brings
to the
table musically and personality-wise that makes it all work.
Oh wow! They’d be much better at talking about themselves
than me. JONNY MATIAS is our bass player. We call him ‘THE DOCTOR’. He
is
definitely the anchor of the band and is without question the most
stylish guy
in the band. He holds it all together. He’s the glue. JAMES ‘ROTO’
ROTONDI is
the lead guitarist. He’s a really complicated, layered and just an
amazing
guitar player. He’s the color. If the band is a black and white photo,
he is
the color. SHAWN PELTON is just the greatest drummer. I don’t know if
you’re
aware of this but SHAWN is the house band drummer for SATURDAY NIGHT
LIVE. He’s
also a very in demand session drummer. He’s a full fledged member of
our band.
There are twenty six Saturdays a year when we can’t play a gig with him
because
he is busy with SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. He’s amazing. He’s thunderous and
massive
How do songs get
written in this band?
For me, I’ll lock myself in a room with a recorder and a
guitar and I’ll start strumming a couple of different things and
something will
pop into my fingers and
I’ll feel like
it is something that I can wrap a hook around. I start singing over
that
phonetically and from there a phrase will emerge. I build the rest of
the song
from there. If I do that ten times I’ll bring ten songs to the band and
if I’m
lucky, twenty percent of those ten songs will work and we’ll all sit
down as a
group and rehearse and practice and work out our separate parts.
Sometimes the
song is similar to the demo that I originally brought in and sometimes
it’s
completely different. Sometimes other members of the band bring entire
tunes or
parts of tunes and we wrap them together. That’s pretty much how it
works. The
very first part of the process is very private and then it just becomes
a forum
for everyone in the band.
What
songs off of
PLAY THING resonate for you the most and why?
NO CONTROL is the first single off of the record. We wrote and
recorded PLAY THING piecemeal over a period of a year and a half. We
were doing
a lot of touring, writing and other stuff and getting into the studio
and NO
CONTROL was the first song we did. I think it shows what we do well.
It’s got a
pretty strong hook to it. It’s the kind of song that we play live and
people
start singing along to it. It has this BEATLE-sque guitar arpeggio
during the
verses and then in gets heavy and rocked out like NIRVANA or the FOO
FIGHTERS
in the chorus. There is another song called HIDING SPACE which I dig
because
it’s a very layered song. It’s got a lot of keyboards on it. We had an
old
vintage Hammond
b3 organ for that song. I also recorded some cool backing vocals that
give it
this psychedelic soul kind of thing. It’s a little bit of departure for
us but
it’s an interesting song.
Is music something
that you balance with your legal career or is the legal career on hold
for
music?
During the day, I do the legal thing and run that business
but right now, I’m so wrapped up in the record that it bounces back to
spending
a lot of time on touring and playing different gigs and working on
whatever
needs to get done to get the record out. I’d say it’s a fifty-fifty
split if
you average it out over the course of a year. In this day and age you
can do
anything form anywhere with an i-phone and computers and wireless
internet.
What
would you like
someone to come away with after they’ve heard this album?
I’d like them to feel emotionally moved in some way. We want
to touch people. We don’t want to make throwaway music. We want to make
music
that people think about and that can get the through a tough day. I
want the
music to be something that everyone can relate to. I also want them to
rock
their asses off too.
MARCH 29,
2010
BRiAN
LUSH (FOUNDER,
EDiTOR-iN-CHiEF)
