Catching Up With... Cold War Kids

Cold War Kids are Exhibit A in most discussions about the rising influence of bloggers on the musical landscape in those heady mid-ought-years, with the buzz spreading to every kid with a keyboard and clever handle before their first LP, Robbers & Cowards, was even released on Downtown Records in 2006. The Fullerton, Calif., natives are a little older and a world-tour wiser now, and their sophomore album, Loyalty to Loyalty, came out today. Paste caught up with frontman Nathan Willet before he embarked on the band's current tour.

Paste: You guys are still fairly young. Now that you’ve got a little more experience under your belt, any big difference in the writing process between Robbers & Cowards and Loyalty to Loyalty?

Nathan Willet: I think it was kind of similar. We’ve always tried to be pretty democratic with each other, and if somebody brings in an idea, let them run with it. If we all like it, then we move forward. It’s usually either that, or we all just write a song structured together with somebody’s idea from start to finish, and I’ll usually write the song lyrics afterwards. So, yeah, they kind of came from a lot of different places. Some of them were really old ideas, different suggestions that we had had for a while, and some of them were more recent. I think it’s pretty similar to the first record.

Paste: You guys are the quintessential blog band success story in some ways. And bloggers are known for helping break bands, and then—pardon the pun—leaving them hanging out to dry. Any trepidation as you release the sophomore album?

Willet: I don’t know. I guess it’s such a new phenomenon to have a band like us get a lot of attention on the Internet and then have real success, like people actually come to shows because they read things on blogs. It kind of makes sense I think, that bloggers go, “Wow, I really do have a big impact.” But I don’t necessarily have any fears or anything about the way it will be reviewed by blogs. I guess in a way I’m just excited. It’s nice to have new music out after touring a record for a couple of years and then have people actually hear it. That being said, from the things that I’ve read, no one is more vicious than the critic who isn’t sure if anybody’s going to read what he’s saying. So yeah, people always say the craziest thing that they can on blogs—usually either the highest praise or the worst.

Paste: The new album’s called Loyalty to Loyalty. How does loyalty factor on this album?

Willet: Well, the phrase itself came from Josiah Royce. He was a philosopher in the early 1900s, and he coined this phrase as a reaction to Nietzsche, who was saying that the highest pursuit of man should be to rise above the masses and to be the strongest individual possible. Josiah Royce, with “Loyalty to Loyalty,” was saying that if everybody is trying to be the strongest individual possible and rising above the masses, then we’ll have no community, we’ll have no drives and connections. So he was saying that those are the pursuits that we should be after. I came across that later in the writing of the record, but after most of the songs were done, and I kind of thought that it actually was a very strong theme of a lot of the songs in the record. It’s like the idea of being a servant to the people around you and being maybe not totally content versus the idea of seeking to be an artist or to be a person who’s rising out of his common group, but is also maybe unsure if that’s the best way to go. And it’s a common tension, and it really kind of came from ways in my own life of teaching in California and working for the state and wanting to be an artist and being kind of unhappy with feeling like I was in servitude, and now being an artist and being able to say and think what I want to. And at the same time feeling a sense of, ‘Am I serving the best way that I can? Is this really what I want? So, yeah—that’s a lot of words.

Paste: How do you see your role then, as a servant? Who do you see your loyalty to?

Willet: Well I think it can only be as general as making good art and hoping that it goes into people’s hands—that it’s important to them and that it makes them want to live well, you know? And it’s so broad and abstract, but at the same time, I guess it’s what you have to settle for. And, as an artist, you can’t go out there and say you want to like start a revolution of some kind or that you want to make everybody feel love and happiness, because really it has to be about your own life, your art, I think.

Paste: The whole '60s idea of art being able to change the world, using art for political change and for social change—do you think music has a role in, in that?

Willet: We actually played a show at the Democratic convention, and I’ve been thinking a lot about whether a band should even be there using their name for a politician. I guess in many ways I think now more than ever they really shouldn’t be. They should be expressing their thoughts, and they can encourage you outside of the music to think well and to think through things. But they really shouldn’t be encouraging you to vote for a candidate, and I think something is lost when that happens. The entertainment industry kind of wanted to be involved for good reasons, and it’s a very popular time to be there and a lot of fist-pumping and ra-ra-ing. And I’m not sure a lot of people know that much about some of those issues, and I’m not sure if it’s an artists job to know as much and to be leading people in those issues.

Paste: Reading the band’s blog, it seems like you guys really get a kick out of leading your fans to great films, like Battle in Algiers, or great authors like David Foster Wallace. Do you have fans coming up to you at shows, saying that they’ve checked out your recommendations?

Willet: Here and there, definitely, but that’s kind of like best-case scenario when it happens. And I love it when that happens, but it’s not that often.

Paste: So what has been inspiring you lately?

Willet: I don’t really know that much about film, but I’ve just been watching a lot of things more recently. I actually just last night went to go see that documentary that just came out that’s called Man on Wire. It was really cool, pretty inspiring. I’m totally new to the world of film, so I like watching Godard movies or Burton movies or Fellini movies. I watched this documentary called Harlan County Kentucky. It was about coal miners in Kentucky and this whole worker’s strike that they had. That was a pretty incredible one, actually. I like that one a lot.

Paste: You guys have about a month off before you start hitting the road again. How do you think you’ll spend your time these next few weeks?

Willet: We’ll be doing some rehearsing, we’ll be doing prep things, we’ll be doing gear kinds of things, getting stuff ready. And then I’ll be relaxing and trying to do some writing. With the way the last record went, and then touring for the last couple years, we’ve had so little time to be home and write music and record it. And I think that we are definitely a band that needs to be home and write music and record it. We definitely don’t like to be writing during sound checks and things like that as much. So yeah, we need to kind of use our home time to be writing and we’d like to put out music faster than we have been able to in the past.

Paste: Do you enjoy the touring?

Willet: We loved it for a long time, and I think we kind of hit a peak where it was so constant that we realized that we needed to be home more.

Read Paste's review of Loyalty to Loyalty here.