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The Flobots and their Survival Story
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On March 12th, people from all over the state of Colorado gathered for a special night at the Ogden Theater in downtown Denver. In the literal sense, the night was labeled as the “CD Release Party for the Flobots.” However, Coloradoans knew it represented something much more than that.
So, first off, with the album Survival Story. I know your fans have been waiting for it. They’re very excited as tonight’s obviously the release show. However, not just for tonight, but when fans go and get the album, what can they expect? How would you describe the album?
Jesse: For me this record is a very natural continuation of Fight with Tools. Fight with Tools was kind of the initial shock, the initial rally cry, and this is sort of the intellectual continuation of that. The record itself is much more complex. It’s much deeper. It’s much more, um, it’s just much more thought out. The lyrical content to it is a lot more complicated, it’s a lot more developed. It’s a lot more, like, baked – cooked in a way. And certainly the music is a lot more complex as well. This record just reflects our growth as artists, our growth as songwriters. It’s a bigger, more authentic, more developed record.
Andy, is there anything you want to add to that?
Andy: No, I think Jessie pretty much got it. We’ve been working on it a long time and we’ve all worked really hard. And um, you know I think sonically too, it’s a lot more aggressive than our last record (as) we kind of took a lot of risks, a lot of different sounds, different things, you know…basic things. So I think sonically too, it’s a step up sonically.
Jesse: Yeah that’s a good point. Because this record is produced by Mario C, who did Beastie Boys, and one of the goals of this record was to get it to sound like, to get it to be more like an actual representation of how we sound live. I think it really has. I think we really got there with it.
Yeah that was one question I had as I know he produced it. As far as going into this record, I know you had a great deal of time. You had what, close to a year? So were you all pretty much sitting around, thinking about it? How involved where you during that time, as I know you’re all really involved in the community as well. But pretty much for a year, you guys were just breaking this down, trying to make it a step up from Fight with Tools. Is that pretty accurate would you say?
Jessie: Yeah. I mean, we worked on writing this record for, uh, nine months and spent another four months in production. And, I think it shows. I mean the time and the care that we put into these songs. They’re just plainly better songs.
And as far as the creative process, I was reading that it’s a very collaborative effort. Everybody’s sitting in; everyone’s working on the songs. Which is funny, I forget who made the quote (in the band) but someone said “sometimes it’s madness.” Which is cool that you incorporate everyone into it, but at the same time I’m sure everyone in the band has a vision of how they would like the song to sound like? What’s the relationship like between the band and the producer? How much is he involved or is he kind of letting you do your own thing?
Andy: Well, it was very much like we as the band, sat down, wrote up the songs…we probably came up with like 25 different song ideas. From there we tried to narrow it down to, uh, you know things that we thought were the strongest. Then we sent it to Mario, to see if like there was anything – because we self-produced a couple of songs on the record, but we wanted him to produce things that he was actually into and he liked. So we sent it out to him, and you know he was just really laid-back, I mean that whole process, I think he just wanted to catch the kind of vibe of the band and to keep things as honest as possible. But, there really wasn’t a lot of whole pre-production. It was pretty much us editing ourselves (chuckles) pretty much. And then, when we got in there, it was like, maybe we’ll cut off a chorus or you know, make the intro a little catchier, or something like that. But that’s really what Mario did, he was like, “This sounds really great, let’s focus on this.”
He just had a couple of minor touches maybe here and there?
Andy: Yeah, I mean he just like helped kind of get the best parts and make it sound really good.
Jessie: Yeah. I think that was the main thing. It was like he, he got the best performance from us, after a few takes, and then the actual technical production really squeezed the most out of that to make it sound as good as it possibly could.
Now the name “Survival Story.” Interesting name for the title of the album. If you care to get a little more in depth, what is the inspiration behind that (title)?
Jesse: Well, I mean this record, you know, it carries on some of the themes of Fight with Tools. But, it was also a very introspective record. For the first time, I think ever this summer, we kind of turned the corner on ourselves, we kind of looked a little deeper into ourselves, looked into the emotional complexities of ourselves as a band, ourselves as individuals, and we tried to see, what…I don’t know, what kind of…what was really underlining the various things that power us, the various things that cause conflict within us. Um, and you just mix all that together, and we came up with the name “Survival Story.”
Andy: And we also thought it’s a very good story too because it has a bunch of competing stories, because the record process is hard for us for a band, and you know, it’s like tough at times, you feel like a family you know, and fight and all that stuff…so just like surviving, making the revelation “Cool, we did it,” and also it being the sophomore album and being like a lot of bands, like you’re in the “sophomore slump,” it’s really awful, and we thought ‘We’re going to survive this.’ We think we really made a good record. So, it just kind of had all these, and also the idea that you know, even if the world did end or global warming, or whatever. We would survive. How would we survive? How would we do this? You know something inspirational. Instead of thinking like, ‘the world is going to end and everything is going to be horrible.’ Well it’s like, even if the worst thing does happen, how are we going to survive as the human race?
Definitely, that’s cool.
Andy: We just thought it had a lot of cool underlines you know?
I’m really digging the name and yeah, it’s funny you bring that up about the sophomore album. Fight with Tools kind of came out of nowhere. Sure, local people had been with you guys for awhile, but as far as a national audience, not a lot of people saw this coming. Now the expectations are a little stronger. I’m sure you felt the pressure a little bit. How did you deal with this while making the album? I know you’re obviously going to put pressure on yourself regardless, just because you want to make great music, but did you also feel that from the outside or was it not really an issue?
Jesse: I think you said it. I mean the most pressure we have, we put on ourselves.
Andy: Yeah.
Jesse: I mean we have a certain standard that we try to achieve and sometimes we get there, sometimes we don’t. We felt like with this record that we didn’t really stop until we had an album worth of songs that met our standard of expectations.
Andy: Sure there was pressure, but nothing like bigger than what we put on ourselves. You know what I mean? And it’s not really, it’s not even like pressure in like – we just want to really make good music that we like and our fan’s like. You know, and we know that fans really liked our old album and we feel really confident that everyone is really going to embrace the new album.
Jesse: Yeah, and ultimately the pressure didn’t impact us, because the sound went into an entirely differently direction. You know, and this is truly a brand new experiment into the unknown that is…our artistic output.
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