How’s life in another band?
“It’s really different. It’s a different kind of music, so it’s taken a bit of adjusting to how to perform it. It’s not as abrasive and assaulting as my old band was, but, we’re getting used to it.”
Was it liberating starting over?
“Yeah, definitely. In some ways, it’s a lot like a clean slate. Any time you start a band, if you fashion a simplistic way of making music, it’s very hard to break away from that. It’s really nice to be able to start over. A lot of the elements of Blood Brothers are still present in what we do, but, there’s a lot of different stuff going on.”
Was Jaguar Love forged with specific ideas or intentions in mind?
“Kind of. Some of the songs I had written before the band even formed, so in a sense there was an idea of the sound present already. We definitely wanted to try to play music with more of a pop sensibility to it; meeting what we’ve done before halfway.”
Did you surprise yourself with how you turned out sounding?
“Yeah, definitely. The song Humans Evolve Into Skyscrapers on the record, started out almost sounding like Jay-Z; it had almost this hip-hop sensibility to it. But it evolved into sounding nothing like that at all.”
Do you see Jaguar Love as being related to your other project, Neon Blonde?
“Not really. When I was doing Neon Blonde, it was basically just me. I had [Blood Brothers'] Mark [Gajadhar] play drums on four of the songs. But, writing that record, it was just me doing everything, composing all the parts in various computer programs. Neon Blonde is, for all intents and purposes, a solo project. This band there’s a much more communal element.”
Did you want the songs to be less wordy, or verbose?
“Yeah, I did, actually. It’s easy to be very verbose when you have two pairs of lungs singing all the time, like we did in Blood Brothers. I approached this wanting to be spare. I don’t know if it ultimately is.”
Did Blood Brothers end badly?
“As bad as any band breakup could be. We were a band for 10 years. It basically just ended because we all saw things differently than when we started the band. We started the band when we were 15, and by the time we were 25, we all wanted different things out of life, out of music.”
Was it the culmination of the way you’d been feeling for a while?
“Definitely. It was basically a three-years-in-the-making breakup.”
Was all that tension, in terms of artistic creativity, a positive or a negative? Did you use it for good or evil?
“It definitely was very negative. Everything about the last three years of being in the Blood Brothers is like a big, black, negative cloud. It was really not fun. That’s the reason it ended.”
Were you wary of stepping out of this thing that’d defined your whole adult life?
“Yeah. It was really scary. I’d been in the band for almost half my life. But, as soon as we broke up, I just felt this enormous sense of elation. It was scary because I knew that everybody that listened to the new band would be hearing it through the ears of what they were expecting with the Blood Brothers. So, that’s kind of frightening. But, at the same time, you can really pay attention to what people want and think about you, or you can just do what you think is right. Ultimately, to be a really pure artist, you can’t be too concerned with other people. You have to work out that balance.”
Did you want to immediately start something new?
“Definitely. It almost was immediately. Me and Cody started writing and preparing about three weeks after the Blood Brothers decided to break up. The whole thing has been ridiculously quick. When the album comes out, we’ll have been a band, officially, for a year.”
Have you been a fan of other bands who’ve splintered off? Like, say, the Nation of Ulysses becoming the Make-Up?
“I was always a big Nation of Ulysses fan, but I never really got into the Make-Up. I remember when Jawbreaker broke up and become Jets to Brazil. But I didn’t draw on that in starting this band; I thought of it more like the Birthday Party breaking up and turning into Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds."
How did you wish to make Jaguar Love different?
“I don’t mean this in an egotistical way, but the vocals sound a lot different to most band’s vocals. I feel like people think we sound a lot crazier than we actually do. To me, I think of what we’re doing as pop-music; but I think people who’ve never really heard Blood Brothers think we sound out-there and off-the-wall, just because they’re not used to my vocals.”
How did you find your voice?
“It’s just been something that’s evolved over 13 years of singing in bands. Around the time that the Blood Brothers did Crimes, I started really taking my voice a lot more seriously. I went to see a singing coach, and got into more of the technical side of singing.”
Because you were roughing up your vocal-cords too much?
“Yeah, the last three tours the Blood Brothers did, I just couldn’t keep me voice for more than a few shows. It got to the point where my body just couldn’t take that much screaming, having everything so harsh. It’s exactly what you’re not supposed to do as a singer, to preserve your voice. It was so abrasive, and so screamy, and so unrelenting.”
