The Used

A few months after the release of their fouth full length album, Artwork, The Used toured across Canada opening for Three Days Grace. Due to some unfortunate circumstances, their show in Edmonton, ten days into the tour, turned out to be their second show on the tour. A few hours before their show, I sat backstage at Rexall Place and talked to The Used‘s bassist Jeph Howard to talk a bit about the album, working with Matt Squire, social media, climbing on top of Optimus Prime and the mix-and-match song writing process that led to some interesting song combinations.

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Bobby:  Since you were supposed to be on this tour for the past ten days I was going to ask how it’s going but then I just read that it’s been cancelled for the past ten days.

Jeph: Yeah, this is the second show.

Bobby: Why was it cancelled?

Jeph: Somebody in Three Days Grace had some sort of family problems. I don’t know if it was a death or something but something happened ultimately and we flew home for the last ten days. Kind of sucks, but it kind of is what it is. You can’t really complain, you know?

Bobby: Yeah, it’s unavoidable.

Jeph: Yeah, you can’t get mad at unavoidable problems.

Bobby:  I don’t know if you guys are doing it on this tour but I know during your last US headlining tour you guys were selling download cards for ten bucks which then enabled them to go and meet you guys after at the merch table. Are you guys still doing that on this tour?

Jeph: You know, we want to but since we’re not the headlining band, we don’t really have a choice in certain things. We can’t do it while they play so we either have to do it really early in the day – but nobody would be here – or right after we play which is right before they play so we have like a half hour window I think. But the point is we’re going to, we just haven’t figured out how we’re going to do it yet.

Bobby:  Whose idea was it to do the promotion?

Jeph: I can’t remember because we did it actually two tours ago too. Right after Lies for the Liars we put out another record that was called Shallow Believer and that was an only digital release originally and I think we did it for that too.

Bobby: This tour now is in support of Artwork which I want to talk about a bit. First off, it was released on August 31st which is a Monday which is unusual since CDs are normally released on Tuesdays so it should’ve been released on September 1st.  Why was it released on a Monday?

Jeph: You know it’s kind of neat. I think it’s just Warner Brothers’ power that they can do that. I’ve never heard of anybody releasing other than a Tuesday or, I think, a Thursday right? One of the T days.  I don’t know, to me it’s awesome because nobody does that; nobody releases it the day before they’re supposed to. There might have been personal Warner Brothers reasons really, I’m not really sure of the whole thing but to me I was just “Yeah, let’s do it the day before. That’s awesome.”

Bobby: Yeah, it’s a bit more unique than a Tuesday release.

Jeph: Yeah, totally. There’s no rules anymore. It’s kind of cool; I think every rule needs to be broken at some point. Especially with music nowadays and CDs, nobody’s really buying it anyway, it just seems like it kind of doesn’t really matter what you do.

Bobby: This was the first album with Dan on it since he joined the band right after Dean from Good Charlotte guest drummed on Lies for the Liars. What was it like having him finally be able to record with you guys?

Jeph: The funny thing is Dan actually helped us write Lies for the Liars, he was in the studio the whole time. Dean started Lies for the Liars, he started helping us write it – not even write it, he was just kind of there. I’m not really a hundred percent sure why Dean recorded it because Dan actually recorded about half the songs, but they weren’t put on the record – they were put on Shallow Believers; because Dan recorded all of Shallow Believers and that was written the same time Lies for the Liars was. The whole Lies for the Liars and Shallow Believers was co-written by Dan on drums, so really it hasn’t felt too weird to have him still. You know what I mean? It’s sort of like a natural progression for this record; but the cool thing is he has more of his own feeling and vibe put into this record then he did on the other two. Because the other two he was just kind of starting and he didn’t want to step on anybody’s toes or anything whereas now you can see the full power of Dan and the full energy of Dan.

Bobby: Yeah, at first he had to get used to how it works and then he can put his own style and flavour in it.

Jeph: Totally, totally; like he was getting used to us in a way.

Bobby: I read that you guys were originally hoping to record with Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo but then you ended up recording with Matt Squire, why the switch?

Jeph: Originally we heard that he might be down to do something with us. I think things got a little weird at the label, a little twisted in between… we weren’t talking to him directly, we were talking to somebody that was talking to somebody that was talking to somebody that was talking to him. So in that chain of communication, it started on our side as producing and on his side as writing with.  So we didn’t hear the writing with until later and then it was like “Woah, write with? That’s a little weird. Maybe one song….” So it kind of went to one song writing with, maybe, and then it just never happened.

And Matt Squire, the weird thing… when we first heard the idea, our label came to us and usually we just kind of do what we want. It’s our choice for everything really. The label came to us and was like “hey, we’d really like it if you guys checked him out.” Ultimately, the label’s really just there to guide you and help you; really because they want to help themselves of course. We’re like “we’ll check him out. We’ll see just to be nice” but we’re like “there’s no way, there’s no way we’re going to use this guy.” They’re like “how about you record one, two songs and if you don’t like it we’ll just scrap it and start over and give it to somebody else?” So we’re like “cool, whatever.”  So we met with him and he’s actually really cool; he’s awesome actually. We talked to him a little bit more and he’s an old hardcore kid. All the stuff that he was into and all the music that he was into was old hardcore stuff and he actually played drums or guitar for a band that Dan loved growing up. So it was like a double weird twist, like “what? No way!” I can’t remember the band name right now but it was an actual old hardcore band – I think they had a girl singer too, it was pretty cool.

So then from there it kind of sparked something a little bit. We got intrigued, “wait a minute, let’s try this.”

Bobby:  I was going to ask why you chose him because he does more power pop like BoysLikeGirls, 3Oh!3, Katy Perry, Panic at the Disco and Emily Osment from Hannah Montana fame – and then you guys. That’s quite a drastic change.

Jeph: A weird change. The cool thing about it was that the first record we ever did, when we went into the studio it was already written. Like we wrote it and then we went into the studio, you know what I mean?  The second record we wrote in the studio, which was a little weird, and the third one we wrote mostly in the studio too and it was kind of weird. So we were like “let’s go back and let’s write it before. Let’s be one hundred percent prepared. Let’s not try to last minute things. Let’s, one hundred percent, get this perfectly done and perfectly awesome before we go into the studio.” And so I want to say it was ninety percent ready when we went into the studio. We went to show Matt, we’re like “here you go Matt. Here’s the ninety percent of what we’ve got and what we’re doing and how we want it to be and here’s how we want it to sound like.” We sit down and we’d jam to him and he would sit there on his phone like this *pretending to look down at a cell phone* texting or I don’t know if he was playing Brick Breaker or what he was doing. This was pretty much what we saw him doing the whole time. He would stop and be like “That is cool. I like that a lot. I like where you guys are going with this. You guys are doing good, cool;” and then he’d go back to his phone. 

It was cool because he was more just guiding us in a way. That’s what producers, I think, should do; more just guide the energy and the feeling and the direction. It was actually so laid back and so easy and no stress, it was just perfect. And he understood the direction, where we wanted to go and how we wanted to go there. It kind of seem like he’s a very hands on producer considering the band’s he did in the past; but with us it seems like he was a lot more laid back then I could ever imagined. He was just more letting it come out of us.

Bobby: Was it weird not working with John Feldmann for the first time?

Jeph: It was a good weird I think, not a bad weird. I would say it was just different. To me it wasn’t bad, to me it was a lot better because it was so laid back that I didn’t get stressed out or over tensed about anything. Because John’s a very straight forward, get everything done, workaholic; which is cool but sometimes pretty intense.  It’s pretty intense to work with him sometimes.

Bobby: In my opinion, the album has a much darker feel to it. There’s a darker tone, you use a lot more distortion in songs like Meant To Die and Men Are All The Same and even Bert’s vocals seem a bit more raw than on the previous albums. So it all kind of made the album feel darker, was that intentional when you went into recording it?

Jeph: For sure. We wanted it to sound more real really. It seems like maybe Lies for Liars was a little too polished, a little too clean – you know what I mean?  And we’re not a clean band. It seems like John kind of went overboard a little bit cleaning stuff up and making it perfect. His idea of perfect and clean is kind of the opposite of our idea of perfect and clean. So on this record we wanted to stray completely away from that. We wanted Bert to sound like what Bert does live.  We wanted him to sound real; we wanted him to sound exactly, one hundred percent himself, like the way that he sings and the way that he does it. Same with musically, you know what I mean? Music isn’t perfect, life isn’t perfect. Nothing is perfect, there are mistakes, everything has mistakes in it. So it’s just better to let the feedback and the mistakes and the realness of the songs and the real actual vibe – the real part of music. Let the real vibe in there shine through and come through rather than the actual notes.

Bobby: Even looking at the artwork of Artwork, it is a lot gloomier and darker. Like Lies for the Liars was kind of creepy with the guy on it but was very vibrant with bright colors and the self-titled and In Love and Death were predominately white throughout the artwork. With Artwork it’s blacker, there’s a lot of death and destruction and drugs, it’s more evil I guess. What was the reasoning behind that?

Jeph: You know, I think it’s a darker record. The cover is more representative of definitely darker things, but in the same it’s a very forced sense. Like the art needle in front that says “art” is sort of like a representation of art nowadays. You look at like Britney Spears and you look at all these bands… you watch TV, you watch American TV and watch like the Grammy’s and award shows, every single band on there is a made up band. None of these bands wrote any of their songs. None of these bands probably even play live – they play live but it’s probably all pre-recorded.  Like that’s “art”, that right there is “art.” But that’s kind of the needle, forcing art into people. That’s kind of the whole idea that you have to work to make art. It’s just fake, that’s really all it is right now.

Bobby:  While looking at the artwork one thing that kind of annoyed me was the lyrics. They’re there but they’re pretty much indecipherable, you can’t read them at all. Couldn’t you have them a bit more legible in the artwork?

Jeph: It’s Bert’s handwriting, his personal handwriting. *laughs* that’s the cool thing about the record in a way, it is kind of illegible but at the same time it makes it kind of mysterious.  All of the lyrics were written by Bert. The way that you see it, is the way that he wrote it for that.  They didn’t move it around. He got perfect squares of what the CD was going to be and kind of designed it in how he was going to write it. A lot of the pictures in there are Quinn’s photos too. It was kind of a co-design with this guy named Frank at our label who does packages; he’s kind of the art design guy there. But yeah, Bert’s pretty sloppy.

Bobby: With the album you also released a limited edition package limited to three thousand that came with a bonus DVD and a twenty-page booklet.  What was in the booklet and on the DVD?

Jeph:  I can’t really remember what was in the booklet right now. I never got a copy of one of those, which you think I should at least, but I never got one of the copies.  The DVD was sort of a documentary, but not quite, about recording this record and moving on into the future; sort of how we got lumped into a category of bands that we were never really part of. Like this scene of bands started, you know what I mean, and we kind of came out at the same time and everybody just sort of pushed us into that scene and a lot of those bands in that scene aren’t even from that kind of thing – so they’re all bummed about it too. That’s kind of the whole idea with this record. We re-named our own music, we called it “gross-pop” which is better than the name people were given us. So we decided that this is what kind of music we’re going to give. I think the documentary is more of a representation of the ins – documentary is a pretty good word for it – of just bringing Dan aboard and starting to write with Dan and record with Dan and move into the future with everything and how we got sick of everything. We got rid of our management; we got rid of other people that we were working with, got rid of all of them and started over because it seemed like everyone was just pushing us into this area and making us do the same things over and over again like a machine.

Bobby:  Yeah, you wanted to break free and try something new – even going with someone like Matt.

Jeph: Yeah, totally. Something weird and different.

Bobby: Leading up to the release, once a week you released a guitar tab from the album online starting with Blood on My Hands. What made you decide to do that?

Jeph: You know, I just think its fun. With the internet, it’s just easy to do everything. We put up videos all the time. We have so many YouTube videos. Actually, Quinn’s brother been making a lot of YouTube videos and putting them up too and they’re amazing. We do Twitter stuff, Facebook, MySpace, all that stuff. We try to get online as much as we can and talk to kids. We put up videos on Kyte even; we were doing that for a while. Um… I forget the question. *laughs* I had an answer to it and I just forgot it.

Bobby: Why did you decide to release the guitar tabs?

Jeph: Oh yeah, okay, sorry. It’s just another one of those things. It’s fun to get stuff online and see what people do with it, you know what I mean? So we’ll put up music tabs and then you can go check it out on YouTube and see people re-doing the song, their own version to it. Originally, I wanted to put out all the tabs for the whole record and all the lyrics and just send it out before the record came out. So kids would learn the songs and try to play it; but you’re never going to play it right and it’s never going to sound right because of tempos and timing and all that stuff. It’s still cool to just put the tabs up at least. Maybe next record we’ll do more than that too.

Bobby: So are you going to pull a Green Day now and have kids come up on stage and play the songs live?

Jeph: Now we could, now we can play karaoke shows too where kids come up. Play Guitar Hero with The Used! *laughs* I don’t know.

Bobby: You also just released a new DVD through your website called The Beginning: The Used Music Video collection which had all nine music videos on it. In the world of YouTube and with most of those videos already on Berth and Maybe Memories, was there really a need to have a DVD collection?

Jeph: You know, it was more just to have it all together in one piece. Nothing’s ever had all of our videos together in one place.

Bobby: Other than YouTube.

Jeph: Other than YouTube, yeah; but actually YouTube, for a while, took it off. Because Warner Brothers fought with YouTube and they took anything with our music offline. Now that war’s over and they’ve put them back up again.

I think it’s nice just to have the high quality collection in one piece that you can put on your DVD. Sure you can probably find YouTube versions and burn them and figure out a way you to put them on DVD from there, but it would probably be low quality.

Bobby: And take effort.

Jeph: Yeah, it would take a lot of effort.  This way is cheap and easy. You just pay whatever cheap amount, the ten bucks or something, and you get the whole collection right there. It’s just easier. I think there’s some other video stuff on there too, I’m not quite sure. It’s pretty simple. It’s really just all the videos in one collection.

Bobby: Katherine Crowe and the Isle of Man Symphony Orchestra recently re-did a version of the Bird and the Worm. Have you heard that?

Jeph: Is it the Clash of the Titans one?

Bobby: umm… nope. Actually, it may be. *Editors Note: After listening to the two versions again, the Katherine Crow version is most definitely not the one in the trailer for Clash of the Titans, although the Clash of the Titans one is solely instrumental.*

Jeph: I’m not sure then.

Bobby: It’s pretty cool.

Jeph:  I’ll have to check it out then, that’s pretty awesome.

Bobby: Yeah. It has the full orchestra doing it so it adds a more daunting effect to it. It’s quite interesting if you get the chance, you should check it out.

Jeph:  Wow. Yeah, I wouldn’t mind seeing that actually.

Bobby: I was actually going to ask about Clash of the Titans too. You guys are in a lot of movies lately. You were just in Transformers 2; you were also in Transformers 1 and now you’re in Clash of the Titans, in the trailer. How do you get involved with all these movies and do you have anything else lined up?

Jeph: Nothing right now. You know a lot of its luck and people that know people. You work with companies that sort of help you find it but it seems like its a lot of luck really at the same time. I’m way stoked about Clash of the Titans because when I was growing up, that was my favourite movie. I probably watched it a million times. You know, I think that’s really all it is. It’s just kind of luck and having the right people behind you and knowing people that know people.

It’s funny. Before Transformers 1 came out… I’m friends with this dude that’s friends with Shia whatever his name is, nice dude. He took us down to the Transformers set way before the movie was coming out, like a year before or a year and a half, something like that. We got to go run around and jump in the cars and stand on the cars and stuff. I have pictures of me on Optimus Prime, standing on it and stuff, it’s fucking cool. Maybe that’s how we got in it, because that was before it came out and before we knew we were going to be on the soundtrack but I’m not quite sure.

Bobby: That’s cool. Speaking about the second Transformers, you have your cover of the Talking Heads’ Burning Down The House on that which was originally released on a new compilation that Warner Music released in February called Covers: A Revolution In Sound. Why did you pick the Talking Heads to cover? Was it assigned to you or what made you pick it? Why that song?

Jeph: The rules for doing a cover song for that CD were you had to pick a Warner Brothers band only. So it kind of slimmed down a lot of bands. And you couldn’t pick the same band another band picked and by the time we got it, it was already picked through and hacked. But Talking Heads was a cool band growing up, so it was like “These guys… this is who we should pick. We should take these guys.” It was pretty fun. It was very different for us to do, it wasn’t very us in a way.

Bobby: We talked a bit earlier about the Shallow Believers digital EP. You guys release a lot of physical stuff, you have a lot of vinyl, you have a lot of DVDs and you seem to like limited edition stuff. So I was quite surprised when you decided to release Shallow Believer as digital only. What made you decide to release it as only digital?

Jeph: I think it was kind of just to see what happens really. I think some of it was kind of bull shit. Some of it got kind of screwed up. I don’t know who exactly did it but it was supposed to be World Wide digital but it was America only at first. Maybe it was America and Canada only, which is kind of bull shit. The finally it kind of moved to the rest of the countries… slowly. I think we do have a hard version. I don’t know, it didn’t quite work as cool as I thought it should.

Bobby: That EP was a b-side EP of stuff from Lies for the Liars. You guys do obviously have a lot of b-sides. Dan said that you guys had written a bunch of songs for Artwork during the Get A Life Tour that didn’t make the album. Songs like, I think, “Something Safe,” which is a demo you’ve released online.

Jeph: Which one’s “Something Safe”? I’m so bad with titles of songs that didn’t make the record. I think there were five or six that didn’t make it.

Bobby: Have you recorded them?

Jeph: Two of them are recorded. Actually, I think a couple of them are recorded but without vocals. Two are recorded with vocals. One song on the record… actually, it’s more than one song; but we had one song before the record, Bert came up with lyrics for it and we had it ready and he didn’t like the melody. So he changed the lyrics and the melody and then we didn’t like the song. So we wrote a new song and he used the lyrics from this song (*the first set of lyrics*) for this song (*the new song*) and we wrote another new song and he used the old lyrics from this one (*the second set of lyrics from the first song*) for this one (*the second new song*). Just a different melody for both. But I think we released the original song with the original lyrics at one time. It’s just kind of interesting and it doesn’t really sound like the other two at all, but the lyrics and the melody are the same as one of the other songs.

Bobby: What songs are they?

Jeph: I can’t remember. It might be “Sold My Soul.” I can’t remember without hearing the old one. It might be on my phone *he grabs his iPhone and starts looking*.

Bobby: Now it’s a little treasure hunt for people to try and figure out I guess.

Jeph: I think it’s kind of neat. Hearing the original of something makes it kind of fun. *still looking at his iPhone* I’m not sure if I even have it on here, I probably don’t…. nope it doesn’t look like it. Wait… oh shit. *Listens to a part of “On The Cross”* I think that’s…. I can’t remember right now. *Skips to “Sold My Soul.* It’s not Sold My Soul.  What song was it then? I guess it doesn’t really matter. *he flips through his iPhone a bit more* It’s not Meant To Die either. I can’t remember right now. Well, it’s one of the songs.

Bobby: Something for fans to try and figure out I guess.

Jeph: Totally.

Bobby: Just a few more questions. We were talking a bit earlier about social media and how you guys are doing a lot with it. Like you have Twitter, you have YouTube, you update your MySpace constantly, you used Kyte for a little while. What made you decide to do all these social media interaction things?

Jeph: You know, we’re pretty close with our fans I think. We get really involved in it. Dan pretty much just runs our MySpace and I run the Twitter which is cool sometimes and sometimes not. It is what it is. Dan used to run the Kyte actually and I used to help him with that, so it was co-Kyteting. It’s almost too much sometimes, to make yourself that available. It’s easy to get a hold of us in a way.

Bobby: You also run the risk of over-information and the loss of privacy.

Jeph: Oh yeah. Already had that. That’s gone. There’s no such thing as privacy since the internet. It kind of really is what it is. We like to keep involved with fans but we don’t want to tell them every little thing if possible. Mysteriousness is a pretty cool thing; but it’s hard to ride that line.

Bobby: Well you look at, like for example, Brand New. They don’t even do interviews anymore. They don’t do anything so nobody knows anything about them. So it kind of adds to the mystique of “what the hell are they singing about?”

Jeph: That’s kind of cool.

Bobby: But for the most part, social media has become a necessity, so it is, like you said, a weird line to straddle.

Jeph: It seems like nowadays you kind of have to do something. You kind of have to get that internet involved. A lot of our fans pretty much live on the computer, you know what I mean? With MySpace and Facebook and Kyte and Twitter and blah blah blah. I’ll Twitter things and I’ll go look at some people’s stuff and I’ll do something maybe once or twice or maybe three times a day – and I’ve been doing it for a while. I’ll go to other kids’ page and they’ll have thousand more Twitters than I have and they started recently. It’s like “what?!?!” That just kind of shows though, a lot of kids, in certain places, pretty much just live online because maybe their town’s not so fun and it’s boring so they can go online and escape.

Bobby: I guess that’s about it, thanks a lot.

Jeph: Cool.

Bobby: Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to add?

Jeph: We’re so excited about this record, I can’t tell you. To me and to the rest of the guys in the band, this is the most personal, most important thing that we’ve ever done as a band in our career. I think people are getting it somewhat, like seventy percent of our fans are getting it; you need to really sit with this record and listen to it from start to end. You need to sit with headphones and think about it and listen to the words and read the words.

Bobby: If you can read them.

Jeph: Totally. Even if you can’t read them, try to read the words. To me, it’s the best, most important thing that we’ve ever done in our life and we hope people understand this more as we go on with this tour. And really, our tours are like karaoke shows. We want kids to learn the lyrics – even though you can’t read them – we want you to learn the lyrics and try to memorize your favourite part so when you come to the show you can re-enact and make that part your own in your own way.

Bobby: Awesome, thank you very much.

Jeph: No, thank you, really. That was fun.