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Dexter talks about the New Album [Part 1] (Web Dude)
[Dexter]: So this is our new system. We want to have more stuff to put on the website. It‘s always been really time consuming to do stuff for the website. Noodles has always been good about doing his journal and stuff, but to sit down every few days and spend a couple of hours is hard to fit in so we thought if web dude came around with a digital recorder and just hung out with us it would be easier and there is tons of stuff to talk about and tons of stuff I want to talk about, but sometimes it‘s hard to sit down and write it all out.So today we are talking about the new record.
[Web Dude]: Album 7.
[D]: Web Dude pointed out that it is album seven, which is..uh…kinda‘ hilarious in itself. Kind of Spinal Tap. In fact, we should do a whole thing on Spinal Tap, but that‘s for another time I think.
[WD]: For album 11?
[D]: Yeah…when you say your 7th album it‘s like your talking about..like fuckin‘ Kiss has like 35 albums or whatever so it almost sounds ridiculous after a while. But the important thing for us is to make sure that they are all good albums. And I think all our albums have been good and sounded good and it‘s interesting when you talk to people who after Smash didn‘t like Ixnay and it was kind of a bummer, but now people come up to me all the time and say, ‘you know what, Ixnay is my favorite album‘ and whatever it is about that record…it‘s different, darker in its own way and it seems to have sunk in more over time, you know. And I‘m glad that every CD has something a little different to offer. So, for this one we don‘t have titles yet.
[WD]: How many songs do you have written so far?
[D]: It‘s like 11 or 12, I‘m not sure exactly. We are gonna play some of the demos today while we talk about them, but like one of them was a song that I did when I was in the studio and wanted to mess around and so I did a cover of ‘Ring Of Fire‘. And, of course, that song has been done to death. But I had this idea from a long time ago where the verses are loungy and all swing and when it goes into the chorus it is really super punk. And I thought it would be funny so we did it and I don‘t know if that would ever come out or if we‘d ever record it for real..and so a couple of songs are like that and so they‘re not all songs that are going to be on the album.
When it‘s time to do an album we are always trying to think of a title, but it is always easier to think of bad titles than good titles.
[WD]: What were some of the last ones? Platejob? Dirty Sanchez? [laughs]
[D]: [laughs] Yeah, those are terms you are going to have to look up on the Internet to find out. We‘ve had, like, roman numeral seven (Offspring VII)!. That would be a classic one and when you throw these out it sounds kind of funny but it is almost something you need to see on paper. So when we are recording in the studio we‘ll be in there and write these out and put them on the wall so you can kind of see it and by the time we are finishing recording there is like 200 pieces of paper in there with all these titles everywhere. Some goods ones from like, Americana, I think Noodles came up with…‘You‘re Too Fat To Make Porn‘. That was a Jerry Springer episode.
[WD]: [laughing] I liked ‘Smash II‘.
[D]: [laughs] After Ixnay which hadn‘t done as well as Smash so I think we were considering calling Americana, ‘Please Like Us Again‘. That was another one… ‘Offspring, Bloody Offspring‘ was a good one. So this time we got a lot of titles brewing around.
[WD]: [lauging] Yeah, I don‘t think a lot of people were aware that ‘Defy You‘ was originally called ‘Meathead‘s Lament‘.
[D]: [laughs] Oh yeah, that‘s right. That song was kind of a heavy, almost metal song so that‘s what we came up with. You know, since I write lyrics after the music‘s written there are always working titles and don‘t end up being the actual title and have nothing to do with the song. What did I think of for this one…..You know I saw this thing on MTV, it was MTV Undressed or something like that and they were talking to this male prostitute and they asked him about being a male prostitute and he said, “You know I prefer to call myself an International Male Companion”. And I thought, that‘s a great title right there. International Male Companion. I‘m sure they‘ll be more to come, but no real album titles yet.
[WD]: So do you wait until you have a certain number of songs or is there some point where you are like, I got 12 songs and that‘s it.
[D]: Well, a lot of people try and overwrite so you try and get the best stuff. If you write 20 songs or something. But I‘ve never been like that. For Ignition there was one extra song. For Smash there were no extra songs. So it‘s usually been only a couple extras at the most.
[WD]: What was the extra song from Ignition?
[D]: It was a song called ‘Mission From God‘.
[WD]: But you never did anything with that?
[D]: We just didn‘t think it was as good as the other songs and it was kinda‘ like a Blue‘s Brothers reference. We weren‘t seriously religious and so we were debating in the band that it might come across as a religious song. It wasn‘t, though. It was the farthest thing from it. Like in the vain of a ‘Bad Habit‘. The guy in the song is kooky and whacked out. I should re-write that about the Washington sniper now, huh? So that one was left off and we never did anything with it. That was that one….
You know for Ixnay we actually recorded ‘Pay The Man‘.
[WD]: Right, that ended up on Americana.
[D]: Yeah, we ended up saving it and putting it on Americana because it just seemed like it was so different from anything we‘d done before. We thought it didn‘t go with the rest of the record. The working title of that song was ‘Stonehenge‘. Another Spinal Tap reference.
[WD]: [laughs] Yeah, I remember a set list from when you guys played that song live for the first time in San Diego before Americana came out and you guys opened with that song and I remember looking at the set list thinking…what song is that?
[D]: We opened up with Pay the Man, this 8 minute song that no one had heard before and we hadn‘t played anywhere for awhile and we thought it was going to be great because it was something different or whatever and the audience just stood there and stared at us and they were like, ‘what the fuck are you guys doing?‘. I‘ve always liked playing that song live, but we‘ve gone back and forth because it is more of a song you just gel out and watch and so we weren‘t sure if the audience was enjoying it or getting bored. So we did it during Americana and we haven‘t done it since, but maybe we will.
So for this album..I don‘t have any lyrics or titles or anything. But there is one song that is kinda‘ punk that I‘m going to call, ‘Never Gonna Find Me‘. It‘s a real title. There is another song finished that I‘m going to call ‘The Worst Hangover Ever‘. But most of these are joke titles. Like this one song we are just calling, ‘What The Fuck?‘ Cuz, I don‘t know why..‘What The Fuck?‘.
So I‘ll just start playing some of these demos for you right now and we‘ll just talk about them as it goes along. Wow, do you feel special?
[Begins Playing Demo]