Mute Math

Seeing is believing. If you’ve ever been to a Mute Math concert, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s becoming widely known that the band’s live show is truly something to behold, but it also gives rise to another idea that Mute Math is a band you just need to believe in.

They don’t quite fit in. Anywhere. As Paul Meany tells it, they really never have. Yet here they are, with a word-of-mouth buzz spreading like a California wildfire. It just goes to show that even without a proper place on radio or store shelves, the best always rises to the top.

In this interview, Mute Math’s frontman sits down with SSv’s Matt Conner to talk about the band’s biggest fear, their new tour with Eisley, recording their second album and not quite fitting in.

SSv: My goal is to not discuss Christian rock, the keytar or anything else you find in every other Mute Math interview I’ve ran across…

Meany: Then we should get along just fine.

SSv: Quick note before we start: You came to Indianapolis and played a song not found on your EP or self-titled that sounded like it was called “Archelaus” or something weird and I wondered if that was a new track or what. It was a great song, so…

Meany: [Laughs] What? Is that English? I don’t have any idea what that is. Maybe we were just making stuff up.

SSv: Guess that answers that question. I do want to ask how tired are you guys right now? Because it seems like the tour schedule just hasn’t stopped for a long, long time.

Meany: I wouldn’t say we’re real tired. It does feel like we’ve been playing these songs for a very long time, but having just got into this tour for a week now, I think we’re feeling a second wind on the show once again. We’re seeing a lot of new people come to the shows and even the same people show up and sing along and have a good time. So that’s the fuel that keeps you going.

SSv: How did the tour with Eisley come together?

Meany: You know, we’ve been talking with Eisley for a very long time. Of course, they are on Warner Bros. so when we were first coming around the fold, they were around there. They were also at one of our first disaster gigs we did for Warner Bros. – one of their Christmas parties or something like that – and we pretty much embarassed ourselves and everyone there. Eisley was at least kind enough to be the only people who would talk to us afterwards. So that gave us a very special place in our hearts for them. [Laughs]

SSv: What exactly qualifies a gig as a disastrous one?

Meany: Well, to our favor, most everyone was drunk. [Laughs] I think they were oblivious to what was going. But we just had one of those sets where we had sound problems and feedback everywhere and we couldn’t solve it. We were out of sync as a band. It was only a twenty minute show, but it was one of those where it’s like, “Man, we could have done without that.” But we made it through.

But the main thing to come from that was this bond with Eisley. We’ve been talking to them for the last couple years and wondering if we might be able to do some shows together and I think it worked out for this tour.

SSv: What’s the vibe for this tour?

Meany: On this tour, we’re getting to play a new song and we’ve reshuffled a few things, so that keeps things interesting for us.

SSv: Obviously you’re known for this high energy live show yet you’re doing these songs that have been around for a few years. That seems like a dichotomy of sorts…

Meany: It’s a fine line between not wanting to destroy the set too much or completely recreate because there do seem to be some people coming for the first time. So once we’ve gone to a city six or seven times with the same show, our gut reaction in the band is to change it up. These are the same people who are coming to see us again. And this is true, we do change it up a bit, but we’ve had to control ourselves in a way. There are some new people who haven’t seen us, so we do want it to be recognizable.

I think it’s forced us to be creative, but it’s really what we’ve been doing from the beginning. We felt the same way when we did our second tour through the States again. You just keep finding new ways to reshuffle things. I think a great thing about the song and the life of a song is that it keeps growing and there’s always new things to discover within the template of chords and melodies, so we just kind of let that live.

SSv: I did an interview not long ago where the artist mentioned that it’s funny to record a song in the infancy in its life and preserve that format, when the song takes on a new shape over time after years of touring. He mentioned that it’s almost backwards and that he wishes he could record a song after it’s had a chance to grow.

Meany: Sometimes. Yeah, sometimes I feel that way. Other times I feel that the more times we play a song, the more times we screw it up. The best it ever felt was the first time that we ever played it. So when we’re just trying to bang out ideas and there’s still just fractions of it, we make sure we have something recording just in case. There’s a few tracks on our record right now where it’s the original demo. That’s the stuff that lived. Once we tried to retrack it and we’d been playing it live and we thought we had better things for it… it just wasn’t the right thing. So it can go either way. I’m impartial.

SSv: How big is the sonic pallette you’re working with if you’re recording that much?

Meany: Yeah, it’s pretty confusing. We probably need to be better with our organizational skills. My God, how many things we’ve lost over the years…

SSv: Really?

Meany: Yeah! Even by just not backing things up. You can think you have it archived and it’ll get wiped out or errors in it and it’s “Dammit, I should have backed it up.” But we have a guy with us right now… that’s his forte. He’s a Mac geek kind of guy. So we’ve given him that responsibility to keep us organized on the little things that we record here and there and we know how to get back to them. I’ve gone through files before and it’s like, “What the hell is ‘Pecan Stroll?’ I don’t know what we called that.” [Laughs] We need to get a better system.

SSv: I’ve read in numerous interviews where you’ve said you’re literally always writing. So how much stuff is there? Are you heading to the studio soon?

Meany: Yes, we are. With every little pocket of time we have off, we’re throwing down new ideas. Now when the official “recording” begins for the second record, I don’t know when that’s gonna happen, but history has taught me that, more than likely, we’re in the official recording for the record. A lot of times, the things we demo that we think are scratch wind up being the best thing we’ll ever record for the song. So I think we’re kinda recording for the record right now, although I’m not even sure how it’s going. We’re always in that constant state of looking for new stuff and trying things out at soundcheck.

SSv: A song like “Typical” is far older, so do you find things you’re writing now are much different?

Meany: I don’t know that I would say much different. We definitely have some ideas that seem very different, but we’ve not played those for people yet. At this point, the ones we are playing live feel like they relate somewhat to the show. They’re not completely out there. It’s weird – and here’s a vulnerable statement for you – but there’s a part of you as a band that doesn’t want to play anything new until it’s done. You don’t want to just throw out half-baked ideas and get some road miles on them, even though they will develop on the road and it’s a good way to find out what the song still needs and what to do with it.

But it’s difficult to do that and there’s part of us that doesn’t want anyone to hear how the next batch of songs are going to be until it’s done and they’re all together and can be presented as one collective piece. But it seems the way fate has unfolded for us or the opportunities we have had to write and still trying to tour, it’s just difficult for us.

SSv: Going back to that vulnerable statement, is that out of fear? Are you afraid of revealing these ideas outside of the security of your bandmates?

Meany: I don’t know if I’d say fear, but I don’t know what it is. It’s just that part of you that wants something to be as good as it can be before it’s presented. You don’t want to put incomplete things in people’s minds. I think as we’ve been playing certain fragmented things at shows, people appreciate them for what they are. We are constantly changing things and you might hear certain things in the show like “Archelaus” [Laughs]… maybe it’ll resurface sometime as a B-side along with “Pecan Stroll.” [Laughs]

SSv: Obviously the expression of your art is a personal thing, so do you think that’s the tension?

Meany: Yeah. You make music that you love. When we put out the Mute Math record, we’re really proud of it. We crafted it to a point that we were ready to present it to the world. Obviously when that happens, you hope people like it and it means a lot when people do like it. At this point, when it comes to the next batch of songs which, in our minds, we really want to take a step up. We hope the songs really grow up. We hope what will be said on the second record will be better than what the first one was. It takes stepping away for a minute and trying to listen objectively, but doing that when we’re constantly doing shows or are in front of people…

I even have a problem with soundchecking and banging things out and the other bands are there watching us or the crew is there. It’s hard to really just get the four guys in the band alone in a room and feel free to suck. I think that’s really one of the biggest parts of creativity is not being afraid to suck. So maybe there is that concept of fear you mentioned.

SSv: It’s almost a bride before the wedding sort of thing and not being allowed to see her.

Meany: Exactly.

SSv: You’ve always been a musical square peg in a round hole, even back in your Earthsuit days. That has to be both exciting and taxing, right?

Meany: I feel that’s become my lot in life. That’s how I’ve always felt for a long time. I really have nothing to say about that really… you just made a statement that’s my reality.

SSv: What does that mean, “my lot in life?”

Meany: I can think back to a lot of my earliest memories of just going to school and I always felt like the guy who never really fit in. It was always difficult to find my niche within whatever my given community was. So it makes sense and it’s not like when I started making music, it was an effort to embrace that or really amplify that. I was just creating from the most honest place I could find and that’s just what happens. So it just makes sense when you look at it like that.

But I don’t want to complain about that because those are the very things I like about Mute Math and the music that we come up with. I like the way it sets it apart. And people have responded to it really great. We’ve definitely taken the scenic route, which has probably been for the best. Every record we’ve sold is us going to play a show for that person and selling the record to them hand-to-hand right there. We’ve just been doing that non-stop for the last three years, which is cool. We’ve had a good time doing that and that’s what it’s taken for a lot of people to get what we’re doing. It’s not an easy sell and a lot of times people don’t get it on the first listen.

SSv: Did you know it would be such a DIY effort when you first started?

Meany: I didn’t. But we went with it. It’s funny when you start making music and get in your first band, especially in the musical climate over the last 10-15 years which is all I know, you’ve got to jump into everything. You’ve got to write a bio, take your own pictures, figure out how to make some kind of video, promote your own shows, manufacture your CDs, master them, mix them because you don’t have money to hire people who know what they’re doing. You gotta figure those things out on your own.

Then you do it and think, “My God, it’d be so wonderful. One day I’m gonna sign a record deal and I’ll have people who can do this. I can get back to making music.” But after so long doing all those things, we finally had a record deal and we found it torturous to let go of all those parts emotionally. It was like, “No, no, wait! You can’t say it like that!” It was really difficult.

So when we created Teleprompt, it was with the ideals in mind for the type of band and artists that you don’t have to give up input on those things. Matter of fact, it really is as much of it as you want to own. It was to really enable the artist again. That kind of idea was really liberating to me and that was the foundational theme that was in Teleprompt. So it was a DIY thing but it was with people who knew what the point was. It was to let it be artist-driven, which was the whole idea when record companies first started. It really was just to enable artists and let them lead the way. Now, it flip-flopped somehow, but whatever. But we have DIY DNA. Look at that. [Laughs]

SSv: I wanted to ask you one more thing about how you merge your spirituality with your artistry. Is that essential for the music you make? Or do you think that’s essential for any artist?

Meany: I think art and spirituality can be hand-in-hand. It’s really whatever you let it be. I think music can be really spiritually compelling, as it should be. When we write songs, we write from the subconscious. It’s hard for me to sit down at the piano and say, “Okay, I’m gonna write a song about whatever.” I really don’t know how to do that. The only thing I know how to do is create music and all of a sudden, it’s almost as if the music itself begins to unlock lyrically the subconscious those certain ideas from observations or experiences I’ve had and they begin to surface. The lyric is what magically appears within a given vocal melody. Then you start realizing, “Oh, that song’s about this. That’s interesting. Or not.”

But either way, a song just sorta happens. And I love when it works out like that. But then I think there is something spiritually compelling – and I’ll talk about our music here – about our music and I like that. I really hope that always stays. But it’s not a planned or forced thing. It’s something I’ve always enjoyed about music. It’s found within my favorite bands and songs – they changed the way I looked at the world and music. It’s those pinnacle moments of great songs that reach inside your soul. And if I’m to be honest, those are the kind of songs I want to write. Mute Math, we just try to create an atmosphere where that can happen.

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