Cartel

On a hot summer Sunday in Atlanta, Will Pugh is running late. Once arrived, the Cartel front man is apologetic and sincere (Atlanta traffic is a never-ending nightmare) and, upon ordering a double espresso, is ready to get down to business.

Pugh is young enough to look like a front man for a band still struggling through the trenches, and, in a way his band still is. The past five years have seen the Atlanta five-piece swell from small suburban shoeboxes to major labels and an MTV miniseries … and almost back again. Speaking about the band’s trials throughout the past year — an album that flopped and the decision to leave Epic records — Pugh is candid and animated. He is unbelievably positive and excited about the band’s new direction, and new home at Wind-Up records.

SSv staff writer Natalie B. David grabbed a cup o’ joe in Atlanta’s Little 5 Points with Cartel’s ringleader to catch up and find out the next chapter for the former band in a bubble.

SSv: So the big news right now is that you guys just signed with Wind-Up. Why did you decide to go with them?

Will Pugh: It was just different approach. We’ve done the small indie, because Wind-Up is technically indie, we’ve done the small indie, we’ve done the major label and seen the ends of the spectrum. For us, we didn’t want to go back to a small indie because that doesn’t help us achieve our aspirations; just the resources aren’t there. But we didn’t want to stay on a major because they are just so one-track mind right now. If you don’t have hits, then you don’t have anything, which, to me, is counter-intuitive to what a label should be doing. They should be developing the band that they’ve signed. More so than an investment, they see it as an immediate turn-around. Which just doesn’t work now, unless you’re Justin Timberlake [Laughs]

But Wind-Up, they’ve been around since The Militia Group days. Maybe a couple months after we signed with Militia, this guy Mike Kahn, who was working with Red Distribution at the time, which was distributing Militia Group. So he had heard I guess the little buzz that had started in Red and he came to a show in Jersey. A small show, 50 people, and was like ‘hey, I know this is weird, but I just started working for Wind-Up.’ ‘The Creed Label?’ ‘Yeah, the Creed label. That’s what we started with, but that’s not what we want to be. But if you guys ever want a label, let me know.’ I was like ‘sure.’

When the news got around that we had started to look for labels to get off Epic, they came up and said ‘we’re still interested.’ And I’m like ‘well, that’s still weird to me, but ok’ and we went into the office to talk to him and just see where they’re at, and they totally wowed us. And they said, “Well, what do you want to do?” We were like, “What do you mean, what do we want to do?” “Well, if you could call your own shots, what would you do?” Well, we want to actually put out a record soon, we want it to actually be promoted, basically all of the things that when you sign with a record label, you expect to happen. You are under contractual obligations to promote the record, which didn’t happen with the last one, so we feel… not shafted, but we didn’t get our fair shot.

So we listed our grievances with that, and they came back with ‘well, we’re about developing career artists, not flash in the pan success.’ With Creed, they took them from nothing and blew them up pretty big. Music aside, what they did is amazing. I have the first Creed album, when I was in the 7th grade, I loved it, you know? I hadn’t heard much else, but it was good.

They took Amy Lee [from Evanescence] and the other guy, who nobody knows his name apparently, they put them up in L.A. for 2 years just to get experience. For no other reason. They didn’t work on music at all. They just paid for them to live for two years and then they came back with their first album, which sold however many millions, and they just did things right.

Their goal isn’t to sell records, it just happens to be a by-product of the way they do things. And just because they treat their artists right, they treat them with respect, and they give everybody their fair shot, even the bands that, they see every band as having their fair shot. They feel like they have the potential to do something and they nurture it better than I’ve ever heard or seen.

SSv: But like you said, Wind-Up is known for bands like Creed and Evanescence and Cartel is pretty different from that, so how do you think you all fit on the label?

WP: Promo aside, and our booking agent would agree, he kinda brought this to light. He was like, ‘You guys know you sound like an alternative band, right?’ I was like, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Your records don’t show it, but when you go see you guys live, the way you kind of put on and what comes out sounds like a ’90s alternative band,’ which is not surprising considering that’s what we really cut our teeth on. Smashing Pumpkins was the second CD that I ever bought. That inspired me and obviously I bought the rest of their records within the next few months and that’s all I listened to for a year.

There’s little nuances that I don’t think we ever really explored. We kinda started to on the last record, but we didn’t really harness exactly what we wanted to do. So we mixed that with the other influences that we had later in our years, like New Found Glory and the more pop-punk stuff. So we feel like we could bring a little bit more of the Ransom EP flare. That had a lot of alternative stuff in it, and it was much darker toned than Chroma was. Chroma was really shiny and stuff. We feel like we need to go back and take the polish off this thing. And then the songs we’ve been writing so far have definitely gotten in to that vein, but I think that will allow Wind-Up to do what they do best.

Obviously they’ve had this huge success with alternative, and if we can just get, just get a little bit of alternative credibility, then it would lead us into another demographic of people that we feel that we can play to very well. With our college shows we always do fantastic. We love playing college shows because those kids are just like ‘Yeah!’ They don’t necessarily mosh. They pay attention and they get it. You don’t see some guy in the front row doing this [puts his hand on his face and makes a bored facial expression] when we’re not playing “Honestly.” It’s like, thank you for listening and paying attention when we play a 5-minute blues song.

Not to say our younger fans don’t get it. I think our hardcore fans do honestly, but I think where the last record left us in a place that kind of confused people who thought we were gonna put out Chroma II or like Fall Out Boy. They thought that’s what we were going for. And, as much as we are a pop band, we aspire to be a great band, whatever that means. Whether that means sounding like The Beatles and writing ”Hold Your Hand,” or writing Pink Floyd “The Wall.” Whatever that means. We just want to figure that out.

SSv: So I heard you’re working on a new album. So how far into that process are you?

WP: I would say the songs are probably about 40 percent there. We have 16 “embryos” as we call them that are basically just music. I’m gonna say half of them are only music and half of them have some idea of melody and half of those that have melody are somewhat complete, lyrically and melodically. Which would leave us with about five complete that we could spend four or five days and play them live and that’s how they would be.

I don’t want to say quantity or quality, but right now we just want to try to get as much out now while we’re home and then when we’re on the road and it’s time to think about it, when you can’t really get together and play and record demos and that gives us the opportunity to kind of hone them down to what we want and get rid of the stuff we can’t really do anything with and make the other stuff good.

We want to go in and record 15 to 20 songs and then figure out, once the recorded versions are done, how many we’re going to put on record. The rest will either be b-sides, an EP, or like exclusives or publishing stuff, soundtracks, whatever.

SSv: So what’s the creative process like for you guys? Is it collaborative at all?

WP: Up until this record it’s been mostly just me. I’ll come in with a general chord structure-ish, a general melody-ish and then Joseph [Pepper, guitar], being the music guru of the group takes it and says “When you’re playing this chord, it’d be cool if we kinda did this and kind of changed it to this chord, which would make this minor” which I understand because I took music theory, but when I’m writing a song I don’t think like that, which allows him to think like that because it’s not his, you know? So he’s kind of my yang to my yin you know?

And obviously I don’t play drums, I can only program them and I’m not all that good at [raps his fingers on the table] tapping so Kevin [Sanders, drums] does his thing on it, and Nic [Hudson, guitar] does his thing. Having three guitars, it allows us to all express the song differently. Nic is very textbook structure and form. When you see him, he’s perfect right angle with his hand. It’s kind of funny, but that’s just the way it is, you know? But it really allows our individual styles to create what Cartel does. The demos that I make and the songs that come out are totally different and I think that’s good for Cartel.

One day I’ll do something else and it won’t sound like Cartel at all and that will be fine. But for this I think that it’s good that they take the elements that I can’t produce myself and we like it because we lean on the melody pretty hard on our music. So we kinda like to start there because we feel if that’s not there, the song really isn’t. Sometimes. There are obviously exceptions, but that’s kinda how we’ve been doing it.

But on this record we’re more so having a collaborative effort where it’s still kind of the same thing, but involving everyone much, much earlier in the process. Over the last nine months … we just recorded this time last year, so it’s very early to be doing new material by my standards. But I haven’t had the time to get the songs where I would normally like them before bringing them in. Fully explored. Have melody. Some sort of lyrics. Like here’s what I’m kinda talking about.

But for me, it’s not wanting to do what we’ve ever done before I feel like it’s a good chance to switch it up. Like here’s the riff, how do you want the song to go? Instead of here’s the riff, here’s the chorus, here’s the melody. It’s like kind of all I’ve got is la-di-dah-di-dah this chord, that chord we’re done. It would take that and make a lot of stuff that’s way cooler than what I thought it could be.

SSv: And things are different than what you had going on this time last year, with the whole band in the bubble thing. You guys took a lot of crap for doing that.

WP: Oh yeah.

SSv: So In hindsight do you still think that was a good decision to do?

WP: Yeah, I mean… it’s [Laughs] sometimes no. Sometimes you think ‘man, that fucking backfired,’ you know? Sometimes you think that. But I think in the long run, once we get this record out, maybe the next record, I don’t know how far it will go, but I think people will give the record the shot that it needs to get. There will be egg on a lot of peoples face if the record turned out, say it sold a million copies, not that that’s what we’re going for, but let’s say it did. And they say ‘well, the record sucked.’ Well, a million people disagree. Fuck you. We win. [Points]

But unfortunately, that didn’t work out like that, so we haven’t met the success of Chroma. So people are like ‘Ha Ha! I told you so!’ but what can you do? It happens or it doesn’t. And we felt like we did the best we could. Most people are fools to think that we actually went in there and recorded it in 20 days. I’m sorry. Contracts aside, fuck that. That’s not what they told us. When we signed the contract, that’s not what they said. We kinda got popped with that. And yeah, you’re supposed to record it in 20 days. We were like, yeah, right. These songs were written six months ago, so it kinda left us in a bad place and we haven’t been able to come right out and say, yeah we recorded the songs… we’re allowed to allude to certain things, like, oh well this happened, well this happened.

It’s too much stuff to worry about at this point. There’s no reason to point fingers or anything. It’s not anybody’s fault by any means, it just kind of happened that way. And I think for the better. I am much more excited about this position than I was a year ago. I think time heals all things and I’m hoping the cliché remains positive in this, but I think the new record is something where people can latch on to that and say ‘well, they really redeemed themselves with this one.”

Overall, we’re proud of what we did and if we had been sitting here and you said well, that band went on and sold x amount of records and they’re playing in front of all these people only because they said yes and we said no because we had these ideals that we’re gonna be totally tarnished by this one idea that somebody with money is going to sponsor this thing that has never been done to this extent, you know, you’re going to throw that all away just because it says Dr. Pepper on it.

SSv: Well, and plus, who wants to turn down someone being like, “Hey, wanna live in a bubble for 20 days?”

WP: Yeah, that sounds neat! And everybody thought we got paid all this money. Like “Oh, they got paid 5 million dollars” and I’m like, ‘Yeah, right!’ If we got paid that much money, I would definitely not have disagreed with anything they said. I would’ve been like ‘It sucked, it really sucked. My kids have college funds, I don’t care what you think.’ But that’s not the truth. We didn’t get paid all that much. Compared to what they spent, we got shafted. [Laughs]

But it’s like that wasn’t the point for us. It wasn’t the money, it was to do something and, I guess, extend ourselves to fans. There’s no way we want people watching what we’re doing in the studio or hearing what we’re saying and doing all of this, but I think that’s a level that most people don’t get to show and the fact that we weren’t under pressure to create while these people were watching. The studio magic is still there, like what if we do this or what if we do that, but we weren’t thinking like “Shit. What am I going to write here? What part is going to go here?” we weren’t thinking that, so it wasn’t fair to us to assume that we were just pulling it all out of a hat. And then getting to see the finishing touches on that is really cool.

It takes a year to create a record the right way. I started writing these songs a year ago. All this time you just can’t let your fans see. Like, it’s going to be three weeks before I’m going to have any melody because I have no idea what to do right now, but I like this one riff. Ok, you can see that, but I think that it is a condensed form of a record being made. And while it wasn’t in the studio, if you took the bubble, even if you named it something different and put it in a real studio, I think it would be totally different. We’re locked in the studio for 20 days people would be like [deep voice] ‘Oh, that’s cool. That’s neat. I wonder what they do.’ And it’d be cool to actually go in and do a record like that, but it wouldn’t be 12 songs. It would be five. And it would be very bare bones and it would all sound like, I don’t know, Albert Hammond, Jr. songs. Like here’s one riff, and that’s all that guitar will play. Here’s the melody and that’s all that guitar will play. [Laughs]

SSv: Well, and there’s also, like I think you mentioned before, like with Epic not promoting the record, it seemed like you guys were kind of everywhere and then after that it was where did Cartel go? You just dropped off.

WP: Well, the bubble was supposed to be THE promotion for the record. To a certain extent that’s huge. Like fucking billboards. But at the same time, the record doesn’t just come out and then woo! We’re not all Lil Wayne. We can’t all sell two million records in three weeks. For them to assume that that was going to happen with us was just kind of ludicrous, no pun intended. They just kind of stopped. Radio schedules didn’t work.

The whole problem with a major label is that you’re sharing attention. It’s like being in a family with 15 bothers and you need a pair of shoes but it’s somebody else’s birthday so you’re fucked. You’re walking around barefoot until it’s your turn. And that’s just the way it is. Nobody’s singling you out and saying, ‘You suck. We’re not going to promote you.’ It’s ‘We have all this going on right now, you’ve gotta wait.’

So we didn’t get the radio slot, we didn’t get anything except, like, web banners for two weeks when the record came out. We relied really heavily on it and it didn’t work to the extent that they thought it would and good old-fashioned elbow grease wasn’t what they were looking for at that point. They thought it was an easy kill.

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