“We walk out on tabs. If I made a million dollars, I’d do it more,” West End Motel frontman Tom Cheshire laughs. “We’re restaurants’ worst nightmare.”
He’s hunched over the tail-end of a barely three-person table at El Myr in Atlanta, Ga., with decades-old friend and guitarist Brent Hinds. It’s a smoke-hazed burrito bar, one that proudly sports signed photos of Jerry Springer and another one of Hinds’ bands, Mastodon, right next to the trippy landscapes of Atlanta artist R. Land; It’s a place that’s just as comfortable blaring Joy Division as it is Nick Cave or Metallica, and the food is legitimately good enough that Cheshire says it’s a shame that Anthony Bourdain hasn’t made a stop here.
The frontman’s just returned to town after a stay in New York, and it’s round two of a celebratory romp through the duo’s hometown in the peach state—which at one point came through the now-infamous burrito joint the night before. And yes, it’s a little fuzzy whether they paid their tabs last night. “We were drinking Stellas, then we went to Bud Light, then it was a downward spiral,” Cheshire chuckles. So, fewer than 12 hours after the party dissolved that morning (9 a.m. by Hinds and Cheshire’s count), we’re back at El Myr (my request, not theirs—they don’t spend all of their time here, after all) chatting about the band’s follow up to Don’t Shiver, You’re a Winner, Only Time Can Tell.
It wasn’t planned this way, but the choice to chat at El Myr gives more material than could have been expected. That’s not to say this writer overcapitalized on the amount of alcohol consumed, although our near-$200 bar tab might suggest otherwise, but through the course of the 45-minute talk, we’re huddled around the tiny table with an incredible spread of guests who just happened to show up—WEM guitarist and backup singer Ben Thrower; Marlow Sanchez, who helped with the album’s pre-production; hell, even former Peter Tosh and Isaac Hayes guitarist Daryl Thompson stopped by, beer-in-hand, to declare his admiration for the duo.
Between 7 p.m. and 11, the cast is constantly rotating with people getting off work, heading out to band practice or calling it a night to go home to their families. Here Hinds is just a dude, not the most identifiable member of one of the world’s biggest metal bands, and that seems like a massive relief. “Me going anywhere I go in my life and someone knowing my name is crazy.” If anything, it’s Cheshire’s re-emergence is the cause of most people, whether they’re strangers or friends, hobbling over to the table. People are talking work, music, working on music, a recent in-town Dracula musical and West End Motel’s upcoming U.S. tour.
“These are our people,” Hinds says.
True enough to Hinds’ word on his preferred location to go out for a beer and guacamole, this band we’re talking about is crafting the working-man’s aural bread and butter with an aftertaste these guys could leave; Inspired by love, heartbreak, tragedy, burritos, horn sections, Nick Cave, chickin’-picked guitars (if you didn’t guess already, this project is a bit of a departure for Hinds’ Mastodon fans) and, of course, a long, shitty work day. After all, Hinds and Cheshire fully cemented their friendship and the West End Motel in the ‘90s through working their asses off with manual labor, grabbing a couple beers (well, maybe a few more than that) at the end of the day and then roughing out West End Motel’s first songs at night.
“I was a brickmason, and I got [Cheshire] a job working with brickmasons” Hinds says. “The hardest motherfuckers in town.”
“I had lost my mind and quit my job,” Cheshire explains. He’d dropped a comfortable living in marketing (only monetarily) to pick up the job. “I just wanted to work in concrete.”
“I got him in with these guys, and my Mastodon situation took off,” Hinds says. “I left Tommy to hold it down, it was a good upbringing for us. There’s sweat, blood, appreciation for life. When you get off work at 3 p.m. when most assholes are waking up, like me now, I had already built a fucking fireplace out of stone in some rich motherfucker’s back yard.”
But as much as the band’s persona lies in rightfully earned good times, it would be dismissive to say that’s all there is to West End Motel. “We want to be a bar band, but we also want to have theatrics. We’re storytellers. Everything is written, there might be three serious lines, but then we make a joke,” Cheshire says.