Plain White T’s

For my first interview of 2009, I sat down with Tom Higginson and Dave Tirio of Plain White T’s during their tenth show on the Three Part Harmony: A Show In Three Acts tour. The band has been really busy since they released Big Bad World last year, and we talked about all that they’ve been doing. From the tour itself, to playing video games, making milkshakes for Denny’s and their recent exposure on American Idol, Tom and Dave shared with us what’s been going on in the PWT camp as of late.

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Bobby: Starting with the basics., this is the tenth day of the Three Part Harmony tour with Vedera and Danger Radio, how’s that going so far?

Tom: Well, it’s going awesome.

Dave: Yeah, I mean we haven’t been to Canada like this in a while. So that’s kind of a cool part of it. We haven’t done Western Canada probably for a few years.

Tom: Right, and probably like once. One tour.

Dave: Yeah, we did Edmonton a couple years ago with AFI and that’s the only time we’ve been to Edmonton I think. So it’s cool to come back to these places and play for real and not just eight songs, real quick, on and off.

Bobby: Has there been any memorable moments on the tour so far?

Dave: I think, for me, because we’re trying something different – because we’re trying to do the shows in a different way than an we normally do – the first night was kind of crazy in Cleveland. Because we had not only opening night jitters but also this terror of “what if this doesn’t work?” And through maybe the second set when we thought “oh, the crowd’s getting into it, this is working” – that’s when it got really exciting for us.

Tom: Plus we haven’t performed in like two months basically.

Dave: Yeah.

Tom: So it took a show or two to get back into the swing of things.

Bobby: To warm up a bit.

Tom: Exactly.

Bobby: I read that you guys were putting a new twist on tonight’s show and that it has something to do with the name, Three Part Harmony: A Show In Three Acts. Can you explain what is unique about this tour?

Dave: Yeah. Well, what we’ve done in the past is what any band would do on a club tour.

Tom: Typical, go on stage and rock.

Dave: Which we love to do, you know? But we decided for people that maybe have seen us for the last couple of years…

Tom: And maybe someone who hasn’t.

Dave: Yeah, maybe someone who hasn’t, yeah just to throw a little wrench into it and let them see something new. So the first “act” – quote/unquote act – is kind of that old style show. Just kind of up-tempo and go go go. The second act is all stripped down acoustically, we all sit down in the front of the stage and kind of whip out some different instruments and just do something a little more conversational.

Tom: More intimate with the acoustic stuff.

Dave: And then the third act is basically a medley in a way. We just try and string together a bunch of our songs so we basically play for almost a half hour straight or whatever.

Tom: Without stopping, just song into song with little musical transitions in between.

Dave: Yeah, the kind of thing that will keep people guessing what’s coming next type of thing.

Bobby: Okay, back in May you guys were one of the first bands to join the Denny’s All-Nighters Rock Star Menu where you guys designed a few milkshakes for the menu. How did that all happen? How did you get involved with them?

Tom: We’re huge desert guys.

Dave: Yeah. We heard about the thing and heard that there were really cool bands involved with it and we heard that they needed a desert. We were kind of like “oh, we can do this!” and back home there’s a restaurant we love that actually has a shake where they put a slice of chocolate cake into it and we love it. So we decided to put a spin on that and make a white version, make a Plain White Shake and go with cheesecake and everything. We actually got to go to the little test kitchen.

Tom: And do a couple different recipes, yeah.

Dave: With like this Denny’s chef guy and we gave him the idea for stuff. We blew our own minds like “this is really good, this works!” *laughs* They put it on the menu and I think… One of our buddies back home, Callaghan, was there with Kevin.

Tom: Oh really?

Dave: Yeah, the other day and Kevin got it.*laughs*

Tom: Nice.

Bobby: I read that you guys had, like you said, a full piece of cheesecake, vanilla ice cream, whipped cream and white chocolate chips. How did you find the perfect mixture to put in?

Tom: Well we tried a few different ways.

Dave: We had a… *looks to Tom* did we have a chocolate version?

Tom: Uhhh… I forget. I know we did a peanut butter…

Dave: We did a peanut butter version.

Tom: That was pretty damn good.

Dave: Yeah, there were a couple different ones that were good.

Tom: But the white one just seemed to make the most sense with the Plain White T’s/Plain White Shake.

Dave: Not to mention with the cheesecake it was the weirdest one where people would be like “wow, I wonder what the hell that’s like.”

Bobby: Like you said Denny’s had told you they wanted desert, was there any guidelines?

Tom: Nah, we just kind of had the idea and threw it out to them and they liked it. So we went and met up, like Dave said, at the little culinary school thing.

Dave: I think every band who was involved did that. They just said “hey, we like to make quesadillas” and they’re like “Cool, that’s good. Let’s do it.”

Bobby: So they sold the shakes throughout all the Denny’s in the States or what happened? How did it work?

Dave: Yeah they did.

Tom: They added it to the menu.

Dave: Yeah, it’s totally weird.

Bobby: Have you heard if people have been liking the Plain White Shake?

Tom: I think so.

Dave: Yeah, I’ve heard a lot of good stuff for sure.

Bobby: That’s good. Back in October you guys did the Rock Band Live tour across the States with Dashboard Confessional and Panic At The Disco. I’m not sure how it worked, did you guys have people come up on stage and play Rock Band in between sets? How did that work?

Tom: In between bands.

Dave: Like it was such a big stage that they had little kind of circular additions at the end of the stage where they had Rock Band set up. They would pluck out kids from the crowd every night and have them go up there and play in front of everybody. So it was a kick for them. We got to play Rock Band a little bit before shows with kids and that was a lot of our first times with that game.

Tom: Yeah, usually the fans were way better at the game then we were.

Dave: Oh, for sure.

Bobby: Are you guys big video games fans? I was reading one thing in the Salt Lake Tribune where you (Tom) said you stayed up until 4AM playing rock band some nights.

Tom: In the studio we had it there.

Dave: Yeah, because we had a house that we were recording in. So you’d get out of the studio and…

Tom: Go to your bedroom, just hangout, whatever.

Dave: Yeah, exactly. It was right there.

Tom: God, that was so awesome man.

Dave: *laughs* You’re picturing it right now?

Tom: Well think about it. House. Pool. Hot tub. That was great.

Dave: Yeah, we had that game set up there. So at night, after a few drinks or something, people would be playing it. It was pretty hilarious.

Tom: As far as other video games, I’ve got a Wii which is a lot of fun. But we’re always pretty busy, we don’t really have too much time for video games unfortunately.

Dave: Our bass player plays a lot of video games. I like a lot of kind of classic Nintendo.

Tom: Yeah, the old school Nintendo games are awesome.

Dave: Did I ever tell you I went over to Nick’s house, he has Megaman like nine and they went back to the old graphics.

Tom: No way.

Dave: Like it’s not all supped up and super realistic. It’s literally still like whatever it is – eight-bit or whatever. It looks exactly the same and it blew my mind. It was so great, we played it all night.

Bobby: I remember my friend, he just got a Wii and he bought a game for like six bucks online and it was from like 1986. We beat it in four hours but it was so much fun to just sit down and play the classics.

Dave: Yeah, those games are stellar.

Bobby: You just said you recently recorded is this really fancy house/studio. When you guys recorded Stop you did that in your friend’s basement. Did you ever think that, when you were recording that, that you would have this big major label budget and would be recording in this fancy house?

Tom: *laughs* I don’t think we ever pictured that house in Malibu, that ocean view, because that was really, really intense.

Dave: Yeah, that was amazing.

Tom: But we always, of course, hoped that we would be able to make records in big studios with big producers and things like that.

Dave: Aspire to it and everything.

Tom: But we had to start somewhere so we did it ourselves.

Dave: Yeah, that was in the suburbs of Chicago in our buddy’s basement. The engineer, our friend, was probably like sixteen at the time. So we were all pretty green.

Bobby: Going back a bit to Rock Band, you guys have the song Natural Disaster as a downloadable song on it. Have you guys mastered that song yet?

Tom: I’ve never played it actually.

Dave: I think Tim and Mike played it and Tim said it was really good and he said it was actually kind of hard. It’s a good song for Rock Band I think with the way the instruments play off each other. I never got to play it, I wish I could, but one of the days on tour they played it and it was pretty good. I don’t know if they’ve mastered it but they got through.

Bobby: You guys have two songs – 1,2,3,4 and Natural Disaster – which were used to promote the new ABC show Greek. How did that get set up?

Tom: Well Greek was just kind of a new show, they had a pilot for it, and they wanted to have a band that they could incorporate into the show. It could be like a house band but also use their music and everything. Somehow we got the call and ended up checking out the pilot and we thought it was a really cool show.

Dave: We thought it was funny.

Tom: So we decided to go for it and it turned out as we were blowing up with Delilah, the show was also blowing up. So we kind of played off each other and hopefully helped each other a little bit.

Dave: For sure.

Bobby: In November of 2007, you guys re-released a re-mastered version of your Fearless debut, Stop, with three extra songs. Why did you decide to re-release that one?

Dave: Because people were getting it online and really liking some of those old songs and we started getting a surprising amount of requests for some of those songs and figured no one has this record, it’s kind of a loss record.

Tom: We love that record. For me, that’s probably one of my favorite records that we’ve done.

Dave: Yeah that one kind of has a soft spot for us who have been in the band the whole time and everything.

Tom: So we just wanted to put it back out there and give it more exposure. For anybody who maybe couldn’t find it in stores…

Bobby: Just make it more accessible.

Tom: Yeah, exactly.

Dave: And we had a couple of b-sides and stuff that we thought could get a little more attention and stuff so threw it on there as a bonus. People who had it before would have a little something new to listen to.

Bobby: I know you guys have talked about this song a lot but I want to talk about a bit Hey There Delilah, your hit song which, like you said, blew up when Greek was blowing up, and has gone two times platinum with over 3 million downloads online. The first thing I want to touch on is the most recent information which was on March 3rd when American Idol contestant Ju’Not Joyner sang the song for their song. What was your reaction when you heard that they chose to do Hey There Delilah for their song?

Dave: I was shocked.

Tom: Yeah, I thought it was awesome. I mean, I heard about it. I think a couple people had sang it a few weeks before that in their original auditions so it was already on TV and I thought “oh, that’s so cool,” like a little novelty. But then for someone to actually use it as their big performance piece, that was pretty crazy. We don’t really watch that show on a regular basis.

Dave: My brother was texting me throughout the show.

Tom: I got the phone call after the show, like “oh my god, they played you guys!” So I ended up watching it on YouTube the next day. But I thought he did great, and just the fact that he would do that and, you know, that the song is that….

Dave: Saturated.

Tom: Yeah, like that out there. You know what I mean? It really must have meant something to them.

Bobby: What do you guys think of American Idol as a concept? People just going on, covering songs and making it big without really writing their own songs, going on tour, doing all the hard stuff – like recording the songs in your friend’s basement?

Dave: It’s kind of a double edged sword.

Tom: People don’t really necessary make it big.

Dave: I was going to say that, that was going to be my exact thing.

Tom: There’s only be a couple.

Dave: That was going to be my exact point. It’s a double edged sword because on one hand you’re thinking “oh man, they’re taking bread out of my mouth” because they’re getting a shot that maybe another band would’ve got.

Tom: Right, they’re getting a free shot without doing the work.

Dave: But the truth of the matter is that you do have to be great to make it on that show. The winners, if they weren’t truly great or if they didn’t have some kind of song writing talent to contribute to someone or at least a selection process – they didn’t make it. I mean Reuben Studdard dude. That guy didn’t make it.

Tom: There’s definitely no guarantee.

Dave: For every Kelly Clarkson there’s like five other people who were in that top twelve that didn’t make it. So it’s just a crapshoot like anything else, like being in a band or anything.

Tom: In a way, it’s kind of cool. Like I don’t mind the show, it’s entertaining.

Dave: Yeah, I don’t mind it either.

Tom: And I feel like, I don’t know, it’s kind of a good idea. Finding talent…

Dave: It’s an incredible idea. The guy’s a freaking genius. *laughs*

Tom: It works because all the winners are very talented and they are great and it’s kind of exciting to see what happens.

Dave: And one of the things you think about is you do think that okay, it is a free shot for these people but that is so intense to go up on stage in front of all those people and millions watching on TV every week, that’s like their training. That is their boot camp.

Bobby: And you get ripped apart if you mess up, you get voted against.

Dave: It’s crazy. That’s an intense process.

Bobby: You have to have some self confidence to put yourself out there like that.

Tom: Totally.

Dave: Jesus, yeah.

Bobby: I first heard the song Hey There Delilah in 2005 on All That We Needed. Then in May 2006 you guys released it on the Hey There Delilah EP and then you re-released it a third time on Every Second Counts. Why did you decide to release it so many times on so many records?

Tom: The first thing, the single – the Hey There Delilah EP – was because we owed Fearless Records an EP in our deal. That song, we had done a video for it, and it was kind of an underground success.

Dave: A show favorite.

Tom: So we kind of were like “hey, let’s make a single, a Hey There Delilah EP.” Record a couple of songs that probably won’t make the next album but that we really like and that’s what we did. We put it out and that was our obligation with Fearless. We recorded the next album without Hey There Delilah and we put it out. We got some success with that song Hate and then it came time for the second single and Delilah was still getting bigger and bigger and bigger. At shows, everywhere where we would play, like we went to the UK – didn’t have any release out there – and we played Hey There Delilah and every single kid there sang along every night, it was just kind of swelling up.

Dave: So basically it was out of necessity. The label was saying “what should we do for the second single?” We’re saying “what should we do for the second single?”

Tom: And the fans are saying “this is the song that we like.”

Dave: So we’re like “okay, sure.”

Tom: We went for it, put it on the album and it worked.

Dave: We figured that if a hundred thousand people loved this song. It seemed that everybody who heard it loved it. Why not give it a chance to be heard by a million people or ten million or whatever?

Bobby: What I always found interesting was… like I have the first pressing of Every Second Count which doesn’t have Hey There Delilah, and then suddenly it started playing again. It was like, “I heard this song three years ago as a single…

Dave: We felt the same way man! *laughs*

Bobby: … why are all the radios saying it’s a new single now?”

Tom: Right, we were a little bit worried about that. But if you think about it, back then with All That We Needed, I think that sold about seventy thousand or something. That’s huge for us…

Dave: But it’s like a drop in the bucket compared to pop culture.

Tom: To the rest of the world, that’s like such a small thing.

Dave: For us, our world was Fearless Records because that’s where we were living and working with everyday. But not everyone knows who that is, not everyone is as educated in indie music I guess.

Bobby: Were you guys surprised by not only the reaction by the fans but also the mass amount of parodies that Hey There Delilah got? I mean, KROQ did Hey There Vagina.

Dave: Totally.

Tom: My favorite.

Bobby: There were online sensations like Hey Sarah Palin, Hey Harry Potter and a cease a desist song called Re: Your Song About My Client Delilah.”

Tom: I need to see that one.

Dave: I’ve never heard the Harry Potter one.

Tom: Yeah, I’ve never heard the Harry Potter one.

Bobby: Some people have called Re: Your Song About My Client Delilah one of the best parodies since Weird Al Yankovich’s White and Nerdy.

Tom: Wow.

Dave: Really?

Tom: That’s the one I haven’t watched. I’ve been told about it like five times and have never seen it.

Dave: Once we get internet again we’ll have to watch it.

Tom: Definitely. But I think that’s super cool.

Dave: Yeah, we love it.

Tom: That shows how big the song is or how much of a piece of pop culture it is. If you make a parody of it, it’s obviously because you know everyone knows it so you can…

Bobby: Kind of play off it.

Tom: Exactly! Exactly.

Dave: We’re flattered by that.

Bobby: You also did a parody of it for Sesame Street called “I’m The Letter T,” how did that come about?

Tom: They just kind of came to us with the idea and I mean, to be on Sesame Street is pretty cool.

Dave: If you get to be a letter, you don’t turn it down! *laughs*

Bobby: I watched the video, the Sesame Street video…

Tom: I’ve never seen it.

Bobby: What I noticed was in the song you had all different T characters.

Tom: Right, I bet I know what you’re going to say.

Bobby: They all had clothes. Except for you. *Dave and Tom laughs* You were the only T character without any clothing on.

Tom: I think there’s a little subliminal message there.

Dave: You were naked. I like that, that’s hilarious.

Tom: My natural state.

Dave: That’s a little racy for a morning’s kid show. That’s funny.

Tom: Yeah, now I gotta watch it.

Bobby: Okay, I guess that’s about it. Thanks a lot, do you have any final thoughts you’d like to add?

Tom: Nah, no.

Dave: We’re just gonna try and come back, especially to Western Canada, soon because we always seem to do that Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal run and sometimes Quebec City so hopefully we’ll be coming West more often now.

Bobby: Yeah, most bands, like you said, just do the Toronto, Montreal, Quebec and then Vancouver.

Dave: Yeah! Yeah! Right? So hopefully we’ll be coming back more often.