A Working Model – “III” CD Release Party Interview

“A Working Model“, the ever-evolving and transforming rock band from Ann Arbor, MI, has released their third album entitled “III“. We caught up with Kenny Mis (guitar), Rob Logan (drums) and Tim Lawrence (bass) at the Blind Pig a couple hours before they took the stage at their CD release party. Over a couple pitchers of cheap draught, we kick back in the Green Room before the show and talk about the new album, the way the band has evolved over the years, the struggles of doing it all yourselves, and much more. Kenny tells it like it is, Rob fills in the details and even the reserved Tim periodically throws his two cents in. Grab your own cheap brew and join us for the Street Team Interview with A Working Model.

STI: I’m here with three-quarters of A Working Model. I’m here with Kenny Mis, Rob Logan and Tim Lawrence. Where’s Chris [Lawrence, singer/guitarist]?

Kenny Mis: Taking a nap.

Rob Logan: Yeah, he’s taking a nap right now.

KM: That pre-show nap.

RL: He gets into this — a lot of times, Chris has to go into his own zone, you know, so we just let that happen.

KM: We just tell everybody that he’s a huge alcoholic.

RL: Don’t… don’t put that in the interview. [everyone laughs]

STI: Who’s responsible for forming A Working Model?

KM: We kind of came out of two bands.

RL: Yeah. Basically, what happened was, me and Kenny had been playing together since we were 15. Obviously, Tim and Chris are brothers and they were in a band with some High School friends. We were in a few bands that weren’t really working out. I don’t know where the idea started to kind of start a band but it was originally just going to be sort of a side project thing where we were all just able to write some music and it sort of went from there. That was a few years ago, a number of years ago.

Tim Lawrence: [To Kenny] Didn’t it kind of start out with you and Chris talking?

KM: Yeah, it actually started out with me and Chris just kind of shooting the shit. You know, it was a couple years after High School that you don’t really hang out with all the same people then you actually do start hanging out some of those people. So I started hanging out with Chris again and he had his band, Hybrid, and me and Rob were kicking around — we just ended one band and we were kicking around the idea for another band. Never had a name, never had a singer. But we were really excited about it and we just kind of kicked around this idea. “Yeah, we should get together and put our two bands together” and we did. We started out as a side project and eventually, me and Rob’s other project just kind of fizzled out. We didn’t know what to do with it and A Working Model became a full-time gig.

STI: How long ago was that?

RL: 2002, I think.

KM: That was when we went full time.

RL: When we started really writing music I think was October. Well, when we first started to get together was, like, October of 2001 but we weren’t really like a band until 2002, early 2002. And then, our first recording came out a year after that. The EP, which nobody — maybe like 50 people — have, maybe, and that’s the last 50 people on Earth who will ever have it. It will never be online.

STI: What was that called?

RL: It was just called “EP”. A Working Model: EP. For what it is, it was recorded on an 8 track Alesis ADAT tape and in Chris and Tim’s basement and, you know, we were learning how to record. Chris does all the recording for the band. He still does. We’re learning a little bit more. Each member is, but, you know, it was songs we had written — some stuff was with what Kenny had come up with on guitar and me and him had worked out in a garage  — like, an unheated garage — a year previous which was probably our lowest point.

KM: Dark, dark days. [laughs]

RL: We were paying these very nice people… man, what were their names? Uh, Bruce and uh, Cherie or something. They were very nice people but, they were letting us play in there for, like, $25 a month or something like that. There was no heat and the cops would come all the time but we got some cool riffs out of it. A couple songs on the EP are from that and then just some stuff that we wrote. And then, put that out ourselves completely D.I.Y. Didn’t get that mastered and then handed them out for free. We didn’t charge for those.

KM: I’m kind of glad that that EP kind of died because, I mean, granted, those songs are our first songs, but it was what me and Rob were doing and what Chris and Tim were doing and it was basically meeting in the middle ground. And it took a little while to actually do that. Took us a while to get, like, five songs and they were pretty, like… you know, sounded a certain way. We’ve deviated from that sound so much and I don’t want to go back to that sound ever again.

RL: I think that’s kind of the way we all feel about it and also, it was one of those things where we would write beyond our means. That’s something that sort of haunted us on the next record, if you want to transition to that.

STI: When did the sound actually come together. When did you slap that label on and go, “Ok, now we’re really a band because we’re all cohesive enough to make that one sound we want?”

KM: Well, I mean, that was there from the EP. This band has never… never had a set sound. The EP sounds it’s own way and then “An End” came out years after the EP and that sounds it’s own way. And then this release is coming out and it sound totally different. There’s a few tracks on this release that you can, you know, tie around the previous record, but it doesn’t sound anything like that. That’s kind of what this band does.

RL: Yeah, we evolved. I mean, the whole idea was, like, even in the name, A Working Model, which love it or leave it, we’re kind of stuck with at this point, but it’s the whole “its just what it is at the time.” We evolve our sound. We all love music and we get influenced by different things. That kind of shows up in what we do and we’re always kind of adapting and changing and that’s– You know, sometimes its hard to get a substantial following that way, but you get bored of playing the same type of stuff all the time. It’s mostly because, if we didn’t like music so much it wouldn’t be such — maybe it wouldn’t be a problem, you know?

(Continued on next page…)

STI: If each of you were to take your current sound and slap a category or label onto it, what would you call it?

KM: I mean, I don’t know. I… quite frankly, I would define the band as just a hard rock act. Maybe a post-rock act, but that’s really pushin’ it. I would just say hard rock because the EP, the very first release, it’s heavy but it’s really slow. End was more upbeat but a lot more progressive and this newest release has a lot more emphasis on the music. Chris picked up a guitar for the first time [during the writing process] so we got to write in a completely different way and actually, with that extra element, we got slower. Writing these songs with the music first and all that kind of stuff was actually a lot more fun, so I don’t know if I would call us anything else but hard rock. We’re not a metal band, but we have songs that sound pretty metal.

RL: We’re not a prog band, but we play in funny time signatures sometimes. None of us are trained musicians. We just play what works, so… People say we play in odd time signatures, I believe them, but it’s not always 4:4, so there is that element of prog, but there’s also that element of, like, you know, indie rock because we’re influenced by labels like Constellation where they put together their own packaging and they make their own records and they do that. So, there’s a lot of influences that go into it. But to elaborate on what Kenny was saying, if you want to just classify us, if you want to be happy with the classification, just call us a hard rock band.

STI: I heard someone try to explain it to someone who had never heard you before as “Metallica and Tool meets System of a Down”, kind of…

KM: I think the “kind of” is the most accurate. [everyone laughs]

TL: I think that’s all, like, all heavy stuff.

KM: Yeah.

TL: There’s part of us that’s definitely not that heavy.

KM: I’m with Tim on that. And quite frankly, out of the entire band, if you were to just talk about the band’s individual interests, I’m actually probably more the metalhead of this band.

RL: I’m more the punk rock guy…

KM: Yeah, I will say that category is, is… there’s too many heavy acts in there.

RL: Tim listens to funk music and dance music. No, that’s not true… [everyone laughs] Well, he does, but he likes all this other stuff and, you know, we all like all sorts of stuff. If you were to were to look at our music collections, we have thousands of CDs between us and hundreds of gigs. If you looked at our music collection, you wouldn’t be able to tell, like, “Oh, what is this person predominately like?” necessarily.

STI: If you could swap out three other bands instead of those bands, what three bands would more describe your sound for people who have no idea what you sound like?

KM: I think you’d have to do that per record, to tell you the truth.

RL: Alright, well lets try this record.

KM: This record? Uh… I don’t know. I mean, I think there’s a little bit of Cancer Conspiracy in there. Some Pearl Jam in there for sure.

RL: Yeah. That’s a band that we always kinda get, not compared to, but you can tell our influence in… which is very “uncool” because Pearl Jam is the “uncool” band, but they fuckin’ rule.

KM: Yeah, I love ‘em.

RL: And people need to deal with it.

KM: I was listening to a lot of [Soundgarden's] Superunknown on this record.

RL: I was listening to a lot of Fugazi and Mogwai and, I mean, it’s hard to say… a lot of Steve Albini. I think that sort of big, reverb-y, live sound is what we were trying to go for with this record. So even if you were to pick out any of those bands, that might work.

STI: What’s the biggest contrast between the last album and this one?

KM: I think there’s two really huge ones. What Rob just talked about is the actual recording. Now, if we woulda tried to have done the songs on An End with this style of open recording, it woulda just been mud. You know… the gallop guitar, the chug this, that and the other… it would have just been mud. That’s one huge contrast. The other contrast is, Chris has been added as a musician and a vocalist, but his vocals actually kinda take a back seat. He only sings, like, a couple tracks on whole record. He plays guitar on almost everything.

TL: I think [on] An End, you could describe Chris’s vocals as similar to Incubus, but I don’t think you can say that at all about this latest album.

RL: To elaborate on what Tim just said, I think where we ran into a problem with An End, because we were writing this far out, way out kind of, like, frantic, sonic assault type prog rock with a very glossy kind of popular radio vocal attack. So, we were too weird for the people who liked that, and not weird enough or we were too glossy for the people who liked, just really bizarre music… not bizarre music, but really raw prog stuff. So we were trying to do too much with that album. Lyrically, I think it’s fantastic. I think Chris had a great idea. He spent a lot of time on it. Some of it’s kind of hard to understand necessarily, but that album is a very dark record to transition to III (which is what we’re calling this one because it’s kind of the third incarnation of the band). Not only was Chris moving to guitar, there’s less songs with vocals. We were kind of moving into more of a 50/50… It’s not, it’s more like a 70/30 instrumental direction with Chris on guitar trying to keep a lot of that melody but also with that double guitar kind of sound. It’s sort of like the whole “wall of sound” idea, you know? We’re trying to hit you with a… a fuckin’ cinder block, basically.

KM: And Chris really picked up very, very quick with this album and where he’s not being a vocalist on some of these songs, he’s actually taken a lot of his mentality of trying to find those melodies and cut through the music in guitar. He’s got a few solos on this album that are awesome so you would think me being the guitarist of the band, and now we have all these tracks without singing, you would think Chris would come in there and play some rhythm and stuff and you’d barely hear him. That’s actually not how it ended up. Chris would find a lot of melodies that he would do vocally or whatever and he’d cut through in a solo and I would definitely subtract what I was doing way back. I mean, like with [the track] Sobotka, he has this solo in Sobotka and we pretty much rewrote the second part of his solo to make his solo really cut your head off. And I was really impressed with that because, you know, he was so new to the guitar. He used to play guitar a long time ago and didn’t touch it for years. Just picked it up and we’ve got all these songs we’re just kinda throwing at him, so I was really impressed with what he did on the guitar.

RL: Well, and the fact that we’re talking to you right now, about to play a show, is that he definitely can write and work with Kenny and Tim and myself as a guitar player. Because sometimes, you know, you get a guy in a band who might be good at an instrument or whatever, but you just can’t write with them. Chris jumped into the writing before his fingers could do what he wanted to do, so he really had to get back up on his chops, but mentally he was already visualizing his parts. And one of the things we were trying to go with is Kenny being more of, like, the crisp, precise guitar player because, you know, he is, and then Chris to be more of the fuzzier, sloppier guitar player and it works out with the amps that they use and the guitars that they use. It just kind of naturally happened that way so that… that is gooood.

(Continued on next page…)

STI: It just all kind of came together?

RL: Exactly.

KM: It really did. You know, I thought when we decided to do this and go in this direction, I thought it was gonna take a little bit but it didn’t. Chris capitalized on it.

RL: It was a conscious decision because we needed to evolve our band again. We had gotten to the point where we were kind of stagnant and –

KM: We didn’t enjoy playing a lot of the stuff and it was just, it was just –

RL: It was too hard!

KM: It was time to do it. It was time to move on.

RL: The prog side of — it was like I was saying earlier. We were writing beyond our means and it was hard to play these songs live and enjoy it and have a smile on our faces because we’re counting so many measures ahead to make sure that we know how to get to the next part. We needed to strip away from that. We still want to do more with the multi-instrumentation thing, but that’s more of a future thing to try to get some new sounds and try some new things.

TL: Yeah, I see this album as a beginning to a new thing for us.

STI: Do you anticipate more shows based around this album and kind of letting the past catalog fall away a little bit more?

KM: Oh yeah!

RL: Yeah. It’s already naturally happened. We do keep a couple of songs and, in fact, there is an EP song that we do play every once in a while called “Action Potential” which –

KM: We kinda rewrote it.

RL: We rewrote it a little bit for the times and we sneak it into our set. We were playing it a lot and we haven’t in a while cuz it has double bass pedal and I don’t play a double bass pedal anymore.

STI: Is there a chance that new version will show up on a future album?

KM: It’s already recorded.

RL: Well, it’s recorded, but it doesn’t have vocals recorded yet. It’s somewhere, so maybe one day.

KM: About your question, I would say, I think I kinda want to play more of the newer stuff because after writing songs and performing — we’ve been performing them for a few months now and the recording’s just now coming out, but man! Is it much more fun to — you can cut loose a lot more. And I’m not doing all these crazy arpeggios or anything anymore and you can really cut loose with these songs. It’s drastically different as a player.

STI: So they are a lot more open? They breathe more?

KM: Yeah, they breathe –

RL: And not to mention they’re getting a pretty positive response so far. And yeah, we’re trying to play as much — the state of live music in the Ann Arbor/Ypsi areas, at least in our opinion, kind of limited these days. Like, fewer clubs, harder to get into [to play], but we want to take this as far as we can as far as playing out of town. We like these songs, we stand by them and we want to play ‘em. The other is just gonna have to be what it was. We played those songs plenty of times. We played them for people and, you know, it was what it was. It doesn’t mean that they’ll never be played ever again, but right now we’re kinda focusing on this new direction.

STI: Are you currently writing for the next album as well, or are you just kind of getting the most out of this session?

KM: We don’t know. I mean… [sighs in thought] This record, and I’m glad it happened this way, ended up being a record. We had some songs, we were gonna record them, we ended up making a record. It was awesome to do that. We already have 4 or 5 songs demoed, not recorded, that are kind of in this vein and kind of taking this vein a little farther, but –

TL: I think this is an adolescent stage of something bigger to come.

KM: Right. As far as, will it get released on a record? Perhaps. It will get recorded, it may be on the Internet. You know, I love doing releases, so with III, what we did is — I mean, yeah, we were up until one or two in the morning yesterday doing it, but if we make it all ourselves, it’s really not that hard. So I would like to have another release, but we’re really not preparing for it yet. The way that we want to do it is, just have a bunch of songs demoed, trying to find some time in our regular lives to get over to The Barn [the band's recording space] or something like that on a weekend, hang out almost 24 hours and then [Kenny snaps his fingers] kick out as many songs as we can.

RL: The other thing is, we were just gonna do them on the fly, like the songs written and polished. Just get that done and not worry about compiling an entire album. And in fact, tonight we’re going to open with a song that’s not on this record that is as good if not better than [laughs] some of the songs on it, so it like.. you know, it just didn’t make the final cut. Or it just wasn’t ready. We didn’t finish it. But yeah, we do have new stuff and we are planning on writing.

KM: So there.

RL: Yeah.

STI: There was a gig last month at The Elbow Room in Ypsi where a lot of the songs [from III] came out and it was a lot more instrumental than your past album, so that was kind of a preamble to the release, which is tonight?

RL: Right.

KM: Totally. I mean, we’ve been doing a couple sets like that. We haven’t been playing too much because we were back to school –  me and Chris are back to school, these guys [Tim and Rob] have busy lives too, but I’d say the past 4 or 5 shows have kind of been around these newer songs. Beforehand, we were real sticklers about that, you know? [speaking sideways] “Our new stuff: wait till we got a release. We don’t wanna play it.” Now we’re just like, whatever! If we got a new song, we barely even know it, we’ll play it live. [laughs]

TL: One of the songs tonight that we’re playing is gonna be an instrumental but it’ll be — it’ll have lyrics cuz we’re just not quite ready to play it live.

RL: But the song is so good that it has to be played, basically. And I think people will be excited. I hope people will be excited.

KM: And it’s named after a really obscure movie.

RL: Yeah, “Day of the Animals” where Leslie Nielsen uh… plays an angry-type guy… [Kenny snorts] who… [more snorting] rapes a lady… and… [Kenny erupts into laughter] I’m not making this up! And fights a bear…

KM and RL [in unison]: And then gets struck by lightning! [Kenny and Tim lose it laughing]

RL: Yeah, but actually, the title is named after the worst movie we’ve seen — me and Kenny saw (rented from Sigma video. Give that a little shout out), but uh… it actually does, in a weird way, fit with the lyrics which are pretty dark, but that’s Chris’s territory, so I’m not gonna try to explain them.

(Continued on next page…)

STI: Kenny and I had talked previously about the name of the band and how band names are like when you name a kid; that’s the kid’s name for life, you know? How did the name “A Working Model” come to be and what would you imagine changing it to now?

RL: There’s no — We have no idea what we would change it to and Chris came up with it. It’s because of his love of science. It was the best thing we could get out of 4 or 5 names we were kicking around and it was just time to name our band. Really, a lot less thought went into it than you’d think.

STI: I guess it beats a name like “As Yet Untitled”.

KM: No, I don’t know…

TL: I’m still happy with it.

KM: I hate the name but I’m kind of a moody bastard. I hate names like I hate lyrics. I don’t hate lyrics but I — Seriously, when I listen to a song on my own time, not even our own tracks, just anyone’s, I very rarely listen to lyrics. Unless it’s a Nick Cave album then I’ll listen to everything very closely. I don’t even think about it. If I were to name a band — I’m probably the worst guy you could get to name a band. Me saying I hate our band name and stuff, there’s not a whole lot of salt in that. I hate a lot of band names.

RL: He hates all the band names.

KM: I wish that we could just operate as, like, a symbol or a sound. Even as instrumental as we get, it still doesn’t take away the name. You still gotta slap something on there. But I’ll tell ya what, doing art with this crazy long band name, A Working Model, is a pain in the ass. It’s a pain in the ass. I wish our band name was, like, “Balls.”

RL: Balls…

KM: You know, like, do you see Botch ever having a problem with art? No way. You put it in bold font, Impact or something, and bam! It’s there and bam! It looks good. But you put A Working Model on something and [talks through gritted teeth] you’ve gotta transform it and do all sorts of shit to it. But A.W.M., on the other hand, I really like, but these guys won’t let me do that. [laughs]

RL: Well, because you can’t put an acronym on a title when no one might even know who you are.

KM: I actually really like that one band’s name, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, because it’s so long, it’s obnoxious. It’s just like, “Alright. Whatever.”

RL: To elaborate on what Kenny kind of touched on a little bit with the art, we also kind of did this record, III — it’s completely done ourselves. It was mastered by Chris Goosman, but everything else was recorded [by us], the artwork Kenny did, I put in my input a little bit, but Kenny put in almost all the work. It looks fantastic. We spent all last night cutting it out. We burned the CDs ourselves and the reason we did this is twofold. One is because me and Kenny have a history of being completely fucked over by pressing companies. It’s expensive. And the second thing is, we just wanted to price it for people in these kind of times. Like, CDs are dying. Somebody might pay five bucks for a CD, maybe not ten. You know what I mean?

KM: It was basically to get it into people’s hands at the lowest price possible.

STI: A lot of people have talked about the artwork for the band because it’s things like old wood carvings and pressings and astrological kind of stuff –

RL: It’s just shit we think looks cool.

KM: Who’s talked about the artwork? [laughs] I want to know who these people are!

STI: Contrary to what you may believe, there are people who appreciate that kind of thing.

KM: Wow. That’s awesome.

RL: Well, you know, if it looks nice or looks cool, like, whatever. Sometimes it just works out to where there’s meaning behind it after the fact. Maybe it’s like a stream of consciousness type thing.

KM: Whatever. It is what it is. But that’s nice. I’m glad people actually pay attention to that shit. Yeah, this band, I ended up doing the art because I’m pretty much just the least worst at it. I’m definitely not an artist. I spent so many hours just trying to get those simple designs, where someone who knows these programs and know what they’re doing about art could have done it in, like, two hours!

RL: [laughing] Yeah, it took him, like, two months.

KM: It didn’t take me… no. [Rob laughs] It took me, like, three weeks and that’s — I mean, I’m a busy man!

TL: It turned out pretty darn good.

KM: I mean, yeah, I like it.

RL: It turned out well.

STI: Artwork aside, when do you think we can expect yet another album?

RL: No comment!

KM: “IV“? Which [for the artwork] I want to be a symbol of just a fist, like fourth down. [breaks out laughing when every just stares at him]

RL: No comment.

KM: Yeah, no comment on that. There’ll be demos. They’ll be on MySpace and stuff because we’re really not secretive anymore. If there’s something new and we get a good recording of it, we’ll put it on the Internet.

(Continued on next page…)

STI: So we can keep an eye on the website and MySpace for digital downloads and things?

KM: We just self-released this new album so, you know, we’re gonna try to ride this out. I think we can have a lot of fun with this record, but at the same time we’re going to continue writing. That’s been one of the most fun things is — when we were doing the first EP and An End, we practiced every weekend and through the week, we played our songs. That’s all we did. We just practiced it and fine tuned it. With this record, even though we had enough songs to do a record, we just kept writing which is why we had a cache of, like, six songs right now that didn’t make the record. We wrote them from the day we stopped recording on and that’s been a lot of fuss in this band, is actually getting back to the writing board and doing that every other week.

RL: Yeah, that’s the creative process. We really like writing music. I mean, that’s what we like to do. I think me and Tim like playing live more than Kenny and Chris do, but maybe that’s just the nature of bass and drums. But, we all really like writing music and that sort of thing. It really is fun. Some bands really like the recording process or some bands really like the live show — we like the writing part, but the other thing is, the reason why there might not be a full record for a while — we don’t even know if we’re going to do another full record, but Chris has to do all this stuff for recording. He does it himself and it takes a lot out of him and he’s trying to get a Masters degree in Nuclear Physics, so…

KM: He’s got a lot on his plate.

RL: Yeah, he’s got a lot on his plate and it takes a lot of time for him to do what he does. Me and Kenny are going to try and learn a little bit more about the process and the equipment. That was kind of like, something that, at first, I think that had to teach himself how to do, then it became his thing and now I think he kind of regrets it a little bit. At the same time…

KM: He loves it.

RL: Yeah! [laughs]

KM: The bottom line though is, there will be stuff. It’ll be… maybe in the form of release, maybe just on the Internet. We’re gonna keep writing and we’re gonna keep recording because that’s what we like to do, but I don’t know if we’re gonna make it a release. I don’t want it to sound like, that I don’t know if we’re gonna have another release is negative. It’s just I don’t know if I can answer that.

STI: Is there a possibility we’ll see this album and the last one on iTunes?

RL: I hope so! If you know how to put songs on iTunes, you know more than me. [everyone laughs] Listen, I wrote them an email and they were like, “It could be 6 months before we respond!” I want it on Pandora, I want it on iTunes, I want it on Last.fm, I want it everywhere where people can hear it, because that’s really what it’s all about. We want people to hear it. We have to go through all the fucking aches and pains of putting this stuff together and making it and our creativity put out there. The least people could do is listen to it.

STI: Hopefully this interview will help a bit there. Any final words?

RL: Basically, thank you for the opportunity to do this interview –

KM: Absolutely!

RL: You know, that’s another thing we’re trying to — you know, doing it yourself is kind of hard because we don’t have that guy in the band that’s really like, the spokesperson or the used car salesman that can talk to people. We don’t get a lot of opportunities to talk with media but we want to continue that and do more of that. Hopefully, you’ll hear more from us and see more of us around the Internet and hear more of us, but we’re just taking it as we can. If you know any people, let us know. But ultimately, we stand by this record. We encourage all your readers to get in touch with us. Pick up a copy. Come check out our show. We think this is our best stuff.

STI: The website again?

We’re on MySpace at http://www.myspace.com/AWorkingModelBand. You can become our friend and listen to our music on MySpace. OR… If you’re on Facebook, search us on Facebook. Search “A Working Model” on Facebook and become our fan. I’m working on trying to get our songs up there. They actually made me send my ID to them, a copy of our ID, so it’s all stuff in the works. We’re trying to get on as much as [possible] and if people are allowed to — are people allowed to comment on your website?

STI: Oh yeah. They can even record video responses if they want to.

RL: Ok, perfect. [speaks slowly in a loud voice] Please leave a comment after this interview or a video helping us do the things we don’t know how to do. Thank you very much. [everyone laughs]

Pages: « Previous 1 2 3 4 5 · View All · Next »