Interview: The Thermals
Photo credit: Alicia J. Rose
The Thermals were formed in 2002 by singer/guitarist Hutch Harris and bassist Kathy Forrester. They quickly gained a reputation for their lo-fi sound and politically charged lyrics. The band gained national recognition with their 2006 album, The Body, The Blood, The Machine. In 2009, the band released Now You Can See, which stripped away the band’s signature distortion and revealed the pop heart beating beneath. The band also added drummer, Westin Glass, ending a revolving door of drummers. You can check out their website here: www.thethermals.com. I sat down with the band to discuss their tour of china, being a secret power pop band and the symbolism of the sea.
You recently got back from your tour of China. How did you get that gig?
Hutch Harris: Our booking agency in New York has a lot of international contacts. Our label, Kill Rock Stars, sent a lot of bands over there for a festival last year. Maggie (Vale), who runs Kill Rock Stars, speaks Mandarin and has a lot of Chinese connections. It was really cool.
What part of China struck you the most?
Kathy Foster: The amount of people and pollution. We played four cities and they were all really crowded. There doesn’t seem to be any laws regulating car emissions or anything. Also, the most delicious food I may have ever had.
HH: Yeah, the food was amazing. People were telling us that it was going to be really different from the Chinese food in the US, but it wasn’t that different. They had some weird stuff that we don’t have here, but I had some kung-pow chicken and it tasted like the kung-pow chicken here. We went to this hot pot restaurant where you boil a huge pot of water and spices and vegetables at the table.
KF: Yeah, you order tons of stuff and then you cook it in a huge wok. It was amazing. We also went to this really good Szechwan restaurant a couple times.
Westin Glass: We ate a lot of street food too.
KF: I felt like Anthony Bourdain the whole time (laughs).
HH: Me too! When I saw all the street food carts, I said, “This is the Anthony Bourdain moment I’ve been waiting for.”
What were the Chinese fans like compared to American fans?
HH: Exactly the same! (laughs) In Beijing and Shanghai, most of the fans were American.
KF: Yeah, the crowds were mostly Americans and Europeans who were over there to teach.
HH; Yeah, but the last two cities we played had a mostly Chinese audience. They seemed to really like us, but they didn’t exactly rock out.
KF: They were a little more reserved. At the two shows that had a lot of foreigners, I felt like the Chinese people were a little more rowdy. Maybe it was because the Americans were rowdy and got them going.
Asian culture in general is very reserved. Was that the biggest difference?
KF: Yeah, there was a weird combination of things going on. China likes to present itself as a very modern society, but a lot of it feels very third world. It’s kind of dirty, and people spit and smoke everywhere.
Were there any censorship issues?
HH: No, but you can’t look at our website over there. You can get MySpace, but you can’t get Facebook or YouTube. A lot of people will find that stuff on proxy servers, and then the government will take it down the next day. But the government doesn’t seem to have much control over the average person on the street. There are so many people that it’s impossible for the government to control them all. It’s mind-boggling.
What was your favorite show on the tour?
KF: I liked Shanghai the best, because it was the rowdiest.
WG: Yeah, we played with a band called Hedgehog in Shanghai. They sound like Nirvana meets New Order. They are so rad.
KF: Yeah, and a lot of people seemed to know them too.
HH: Yeah, they were really cool. Lots of chorus pedals on the guitar. Nirvana and New Order meet at the chorus pedal.
Let’s switch gears a bit. Now You Can See came out a year ago. It has a much poppier sound than your other records. Was that a conscious choice, or a natural evolution of your sound?
KF: I think it was pretty natural. I think all our records have a very natural progression. With every record, we try to write more dynamic songs. We’re trying to get away from just writing fast power chord songs and getting into more varied tempos. It was both conscious and natural.
Do you think the poppier sound made the messages in your music more accessible?
HH: If you go to the shows, the songs from The Body, The Blood, The Machine get people the most psyched. I don’t really know what people think of Now We Can See, but I know that The Body, The Blood is usually their favorite record.
The first time I heard Now We Can See, I thought it sounded like an angrier version of The Raspberries.
HH: Totally. Like Kathy was saying, we don’t sit down and actually say, “This is the kind of record we’re going to make.” We just start writing and then look back at what we’ve made and decide what it is. I used power pop to describe the record in the press release, but it definitely wasn’t our intention to make a power pop record. We just listened to what we were doing and were like, “We made a power pop record.” It makes sense because the first two Weezer records have always been a big influence. We try to make each record a little different from the last one, but never a complete reinvention.
You still sounded like yourselves, but there was less distortion.
KF: Exactly. It’s the same kind of songwriting, but with a cleaner recording.
The sea is a recurring motif on Now We Can See. What does that image evoke for you?
HH: It started on The Body, The Blood and the Machine with “Back to the Sea.” There is a little strain in both of those records about de-evolution, with humans becoming fish again. That’s kind of an arrogant human point of view. On “When I Died,” the narrator finds out that it can’t happen. A lot of stuff we write is about the arrogance of humans, because humans are wrong a lot. We kept using the sea because Kathy and I went to a house on the Oregon coast and wrote a lot of the lyrics for Now We Can See there. The ocean kinda snuck in. The ocean is a really good tool for writing lyrics I think because it is so vast and unconquerable.
Both Now We Can See and The Body, The Blood and The Machine have political overtones, but you never actually call out the issues. Is it easier to write using abstract metaphors?
HH: It’s not easier, but it’s a way of making sure that the records aren’t dated. If you listen to the punk bands from the first half of the ‘80s, they talk about Reagan all the time. That was cool then, but it’s lost its usefulness because it’s stuck in that time. We try to make records that could describe any point in time instead of letting it get stuck in whatever year we wrote it.
Do you think it challenges the fans to figure out what you are trying to say?
KF: No, I don’t think we’re conscious of that when we’re writing. It’s just more fun to write it from a character’s point of view.
HH: We’re always trying to please ourselves. When I’m writing, I just wanna make sure that I like the lyrics and that these guys like the lyrics. It ends there. If anyone else likes it, that’s fine but it’s never tailored for the listener. You hope people like it, but I think it’s more honest to make stuff we like and make it good.
The Body, The Blood, The Machine was released during the Bush administration. Four years have passed, and we have a new administration, but the paranoia about the religious right is still there. Do you think it’s gotten worse with all the tea parties and everything?
HH: The tea party thing is huge in the media, but when you look at how many people are actually in it, it’s very small. My paranoia has gone down a lot. Sarah Palin is still scary in the sense that you hope that she doesn’t incite some nut to do something. That’s kind of scary.
WG: Yeah, but if some crazy person is going to do some shit like that, they are going to find a reason to do it regardless. If it’s not a tea party, then it’s a dog telling them to kill someone.
Ozzy made me do it.
HH: (laughs) Exactly!
What does the new album sound like?
HH: The instrumentation is much simpler. There are no overdubs, just guitar, bass and drums with one track of singing. Kathy and Westin both sing on it. The album is called Personal Life and it’s about the negative side of being in a relationship.
So it’s a new direction?
HH: Definitely. I tried to keep politics out of Now We Can See, but there were still two or three songs. It’s still about politics, but it’s more the politics of everyday life. It’s the power and control of running a country vs. the power and control you have over a relationship. How many times does power change hands in a relationship? One person is always trying harder to be won over or vice versa.
You have to have a balance. The Clash did that all the time.
HH: Totally. You can’t be all political.
What’s your songwriting process like?
HH: It’s changed a lot. On the new record, Kathy wrote a lot of the riffs on bass. So Kathy would write the bass, Westin would write the drums and I would play a guitar riff over it and sing. There were a few songs that I wrote myself and brought to the band, but a lot it was written with the three of us in the same room. It was really cool because we hadn’t done that in a really long time.
WG: It happened really fast. We wrote most of the record within a span of three weeks. It was so fast that we couldn’t remember what we had done. We would write a song and then the next day write a different song and try to remember the song we wrote the day before. It was hard to keep up with, but really exciting.
Has it always been that fast?
HH: Fuckin’ A was the only other record that was written by a full band. I wrote the first record myself and then Kathy and I wrote the last two. When it was just Kathy and I, it was fun but we didn’t know what the song was until it was actually finished. The great thing about this record is that there are no overdubs. The songs sound exactly how we play them in our practice space. There are a few little studio tricks here and there, but it was a really raw, old fashioned way of doing a record, where the band just plays the songs in the studio.
Westin, you just joined the band. Did recording the album this way establish chemistry between you, Kathy and Hutch?
WG: Definitely. I never get sick of these guys. The more time we spend together, the more fun I have.
HH: The three of us got a really good chemistry really fast. For the last record, we went to Europe five times, we did the US for two months and we did all these other trips. There were only a couple days we didn’t see each other for a year and a half. It was strange, but in the best way.
