CITAZIONE
MR - A lot of your lyrics seem kind of abstract. I, to be honest, can't actually work out what the majority of the At The Drive-In and Mars Volta songs are actually about at all. Are they deliberately written as abstract lyrics, or do they all have a thread to them and a meaning to the individual songs which is known only to you?
CB - Well, certain songs are known only to us, and then certain songs have an obvious meaning to them, but now I write stuff with Jeremy. Jeremy does our the vocal effects, and hes a fantastic writer and hes a ... hes one of the spirits from El Paso that I learned a lot from, like theres a lot of people that we used to hang out with in, like, 1993 when we were experimenting with a lot of drugs and stuff, and when it came to experimenting we experimented with a lot of different writing techniques as well, it wasn't just music. So I've been in a band with Omar and Jeremy for a really long time, and it just changed different names the whole time, so its ... sometimes the way we write now can be deliberately like "decipher your own message", and sometimes it can be like, we have a song called Concertina, and that song is about one of the people who should probably be in The Mars Volta right now who passed away. He took his own life a long time ago, and it deals with, not necessarily the whole emo thing of "oh I miss you", but this certain friend of ours, his name is Julio Vanegas, he took his life for a certain reason, and someone pushed him over the edge to do it, and I know that person, and this song, to me, is a way of calling out that person and its basically accusing them of killing our friend. And so, its like, there are some songs that are just blatant and there are some songs which don't make sense to people, but thats the way we write them, you know.
MR - Does that person actually know that the songs about them?
CB - No. That person actually used to play in At The Drive-In and we kicked him out mid-tour.
MR - Oh, was that Ben?
CB - Yeah, it was Ben. He had a mental breakdown, and a lot of people questioned us for kicking him out, a lot of people thought we kicked him out because he was bigger than us, and everyone thought that At The Drive-In had this weight agenda, and it was ridiculous. The same kind of thing that The Locust go through. But he knows. I let him know when we kicked him out, but hes a little mental, you know, hes on drugs and psychiatric help and he understands and there were a lot of people around when that whole incident happened that don't really wanna touch it.
MR - You took him off the El Gran Orgo list, right?
CB - Yeah, we didn't list him. We didn't list him, yeah. It was our way of ... it was our way of saying "fuck you" to him, basically. I mean, thats my ... thats where I come from. You can ask everyone in At The Drive-In and they might tell you something different but thats why I didn't want him to be listed on the album. Because theres a lot of fucked up ... er ... I mean, theres sociopaths and theres psychopaths, you know, and he was a sociopath. Concertina is about the sociopath, and to me its about calling him out for what he did. And I lost a friend over it. I lost a friend over it and to this day we miss him immensely, and we have a song about him and he taught us everything you need to learn about art. He taught us what it was like to be an artist every day, whether you shit, breathe or fucking just do art. I learned it from Julio, you know, and I think its appropriate that we celebrate his spirit, you know.
