Interview: Against Me!

Just last month I got a chance to talk to the guys in Mastodon when they came to town and they mentioned that they'll be touring with you guys later this year. Why did you decide to join up with them? Tom Gabel: We are both booked by the same booking agent, and then we also both have the same A&R guy at Warner [Brothers], so that was kind of how it started. But independently of all of that, we're also fans of Mastodon, so we think it's sort of a cool idea.

What do you think that tour will be like? I don't know. When the idea first started getting thrown around, we had some people who were like, 'Don't do that tour, their fans will kill you.' [Laughs] But we were like, 'Whatever, man.' We enjoy the challenge. I think it will be really cool. A couple of years ago we did a tour with The Blood Brothers and that was, I think, one of my favorite tours we've ever done because you had a really diverse crowd come out. You had their fans who are totally independent of our fans, and then our fans coming out, who are totally independent of their fans, and then surprisingly most people who came would stay and watch other bands. I think it really opened people's eyes and turned them on to other stuff.

Last summer you played the Warped Tour for the first time. What was it like for you to be a part of that tour? This is the question that if you asked all of us you would get different answers. Me, personally, I had a really good time. [Laughs] I don't know if it was just because of the company I had on the tour, but it was awesome. There were definitely downsides to it, like the way the Warped Tour works, you never have the same [time] slot. We played the earliest we've ever played which was at 10:30 a.m. And it was always like guaranteed that if you hung out really late the night before and drank a lot, that you were playing like first thing the next morning. So you were regularly punished. [Laughs] All in all, I had a really great time. I know everybody says it, but it was like a weird summer camp. It was just fun hanging out.

Was there a reason why you hadn't played the tour in the past? Had you heard things about it that kept you away? There are a lot of aspects of it that I don't really like. I went to the Warped Tour when I was sixteen or seventeen, but apart from going that one time, I wouldn't necessarily go myself. I don't really like big, outdoor, festival-type events like that. I think waiting in line is a real drag. I don't like paying overpriced amounts of money for concessions or things like water. So from a music fan standpoint, I can understand never wanting to go to something like that. But being there all summer, everyone I saw looked like they were having a good time, so you can't really damn them for going and enjoying themselves. They wanted to do that and they wanted to spend their money, so hats off to them. But we were never about to, not to sound bad, but, we were only going to do it if we were [on the] main stage. [Laughs] We feel like we've paid our dues in other ways and we don't really need to pay our dues on that tour.

When you play overseas in Europe, how differently have you been received as opposed to when you tour the U.S.? We made a lot of different choices overseas than we have in the States. We have a booking agent, who's a great booking agent, and we've gotten a lot of bigger tours, like Warped Tour, or a lot of bigger support tours, like playing with Green Day or going out with Alkaline Trio. In Europe, we've kept it really lo-fi and always played like squats and have just gone over there for a month or two months at a time and rode around in a sprinter van. They do it a lot different over there. The squats really have it a lot more together. Most of the squats have better sound systems than the clubs do in America. The way they treat bands is a lot different. It's a lot more of an event. And it's not because of like, 'Ooh, you're this big name band,' or anything, it's just like you're a band and you're playing a show. You show up at the venue and they have rooms quartered off for bands to sleep in, they have showers, there's a big meal cooked for everybody, everybody eats dinner together and in the morning everyone eats breakfast together, so it's just a lot different over there.

So was that sort of atmosphere part of the reason why you decided to record your live album in London? That was just really about the timing of it all. We wanted to do a live record and the next tours that were coming up, the only tour that was coming up that was our own tour was the U.K. tour. The next tour after that was the Alkaline Trio tour and we didn't want to do a live record for a tour where we were supporting another band and we didn't want to do a live record on Warped Tour. So it just made sense.

The title track off the live album ("Americans Abroad") directly deals with how the international community views Americans when they travel. Did you write that song in response to a specific experience you had while touring? It's more just cumulative from every time I've been over to Europe. It's more from the perspective of the way I view Americans. [Laughs] Which is most of the time wanting to disassociate myself from them, and apologize to people and be like, 'I'm really sorry. I'm not with them.' You definitely see that a lot, too, with the band scene. It used to be American bands going over to Europe and getting the chance to tour was something that was really rare. And now you have it completely saturated and every band that wants to just goes over there and thinks that it's their God-given right to be able to tour in Europe. They don't necessarily appreciate the individual cultures or anything like that. They think that each country should adapt to them and that everybody should learn English as opposed to you making the effort to learn another country's language. It always annoys me when we go over and we stop at a gas station and there's a McDonald's and people start eating at McDonald's, or whatever. I really try to keep it as local as possible in whatever country we're in.

Many people in Europe have developed a negative opinion of Americans because of our government's foreign policy, particularly the war in Iraq. Have you had anyone over there come up to you and hassle you on any of those terms while you've been over there? No, the only time we've ever had any negative experience with something like that was from American troops while we were over there. We were in Germany and we played this one show that was near a base and a bunch of American soldiers came out and they got a little lit during the show and afterwards they were all high and mighty belligerent. Like, 'We're dying for you. You need to stop bad mouthing our boss.' Really arrogant posturing. We're driving away in the van and they're pounding on the windows. But all of our experiences with any kind of Europeans have always been positive. They'll have questions, like, 'What do you think about American foreign policy?' or 'What do you think about the war in Iraq?' Which is completely reasonable. And as long as you engage them in that conversation, like for us, we usually share the same viewpoints – we're against the war in Iraq – so it's pretty easy to find a common ground.

How much did the war weigh in on the new album? It was weird. When I was thinking about it, when I was writing this album, for the past two records there have been at least two or three songs that are directly aimed at that specific topic, the war in Iraq, or have been aimed around it in some way. It's a frustrating thing to think of different ways to voice the same opinion in a new creative way to get people to think about it. I think it's important to acknowledge that it's happening. You have to acknowledge that it's happening now and for me I want to make records that are specific to a time and place and kind of capture that moment, so it would be wrong to deny that that's happening and it would be a complete error to overlook that. But when approaching it on this record, I had the mentality that I just wanted to write one really great song, like completely capturing how I feel about it, as opposed to trying to strew it out and mix it in with other stuff all over the record. There's still references to it in a lot of other ways in various songs, but I made sure that I wrote a song that was completely directly aimed at that topic.

Titling the new record New Wave, does that mean you feel like there is a tide of change coming? Yeah, that's definitely what we were going for with the title. We weren't implying the style of music. [Laughs] We were trying to steal back the words with the idea. And not only in the political climate or anything like that, but musically too. We're hoping for a real rebirth. Just wanting it to be fresh. It seems to me, like, during the past couple of years, things have been discouraged and unsure of themselves; and me personally, I'd really like to see this generation come into its own.

With Butch Vig (of Nirvana/Smashing Pumpkins/Garbage fame) producing and Tegan from Tegan and Sara having guest vocals on the new album, there will obviously be some different sounds from what you've done before. Were there a lot of things overall that you wanted to do that were going to be a change of pace? Yeah. The writing process was just kind of different. I feel like everything for us as a band over the last couple of years has been building up to this record in a way. In lots of ways we started as a certain type of band, and it was really kind of folk-driven and acoustic music and we've kind of gotten louder and louder. I feel like we've been kind of unsure, at least I've been kind of unsure of myself, because you have these people telling you that it used to be so much better when it was just an acoustic guitar and buckets. For me, I'm thinking, 'I want to play my electric guitar. I want to get up there and I want to be loud.' [Laughs] I want to do it this way. So I tried to straddle the fence in some way, trying to make people happy by giving a little bit of acoustic in there too. I feel like musically this record is completely sure of itself and in some ways it's not all that different. But in a lot of ways I do feel like it is different. There's just a lot of attention paid to songwriting and the craft of that, I guess. Although, 'craft' is a horrible word. [Laughs] I just wanted to write a good record. I wanted to write a solid record. I didn't want to have a record where people would be like, 'That song's good, that song's okay, those songs suck, and maybe there's another song towards the end that's pretty good.' I wanted to write a record that you would put it on, and from start to finish, your attention would be completely grabbed, it would finish too soon, and you would be like, 'Holy fuck, I need to listen to that again.' And you would listen to it again.