Interviste e articoli di carattere generale, sui TMV, ovviamente!

Having risen to fame with and walked away from At The Drive-In, Omar Rodriguez Lopez went on to create the experimental rock behemoth that is The Mars Volta with fellow ex-At The Drive-In band mate and best friend Cedric Bixler-Zavala. Subba caught up with him as he prepares to unleash some previously unreleased solo material from his extensive archive...



What has prompted you to go back into your archive and release these albums now? It's stuff that I had in the archive at the studio, and I thought it'd be nice to take the chance to share it. I make about seven or so records a year, so if I only put out one or two then you can imagine over the years that I've accumulated a whole vault full of records. Then someone will be playing one of the tracks, or someone will say 'Hey, what happened to that one song I heard you record? I really like that', so I'll go and dig it out. 'Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fungus' is a great example of that because it's a record that I made while Jeremy (Michael Ward) was alive and although he didn't actually play on the record, he was in the studio the whole time that I was recording and I have really good memories when I hear the record; it sends chills up my spine, and I thought it would be a nice sentiment for Jeremy.



The albums were recorded shortly after the demise of At The Drive-In. Was it material that you'd had for a while? They were tracks that were already written and actually would have become At The Drive-In songs. I was writing all the time, and when At The Drive-In started to become 'successful', you can imagine for someone from El Paso who's been making music since he was 12 to suddenly be validated in the music world, it was really inspiring. It made me feel like 'Oh, great, I should listen to my instinct, I am good at what I'm doing'. When that started happening I became really inspired and started believing in myself, even more than I had, so I was writing the whole time. We were able to put an At The Drive-In record out each year, and there was material that I was putting together for what would have been the next album. What started to make it evident for me that I needed to leave the band was that when I presented the tracks to the rest of the band and heard the way that they played them, it started to sound simplified and similar to stuff that we'd already recorded. For me, that's something I just can't do, not in that band, not in any band. If the songs were starting to sound the same then I realised I needed a new way to play and needed to work with a new set of musicians who would interpret the songs differently.



What would you say were the most valuable lessons that you took from your time in At The Drive-In? Fuck, there were so many of them. Most importantly I learnt to always trust my instinct because it always put me in the right direction, no matter how painful the realisation was. These guys were my friends, we'd toured for seven years together, so it was like breaking off a seven-year relationship with a woman that you still like, you know what I mean? Just realising that it doesn't work anymore, we've grown apart, whatever. So, as painful as it was to tell them that I didn't feel we could create anything new together, I was right to follow my instinct because I was so much happier after. I learnt so many lessons from being in At The Drive-In because I basically grew up in the band, I became a man in that band. I was with them from when I was 17 until I was 25, so all the life lessons that happened in that time happened on the road with the band. A great friend died, I fell in and out of love, I learned a lot about living together, sharing together, struggling together. We didn't have anything for a long time, it was just the five of us in the band.



So was that feeling of not being able to take things further with At The Drive-In, but obviously wanting to take things further creatively, what prompted putting together The Mars Volta? That's what it was completely. People are always saying to me that I'm quoted as having said that leaving At The Drive-In was all to do with not being able to deal with mainstream success, and it wasn't that at all. It was great and inspiring to be validated all of a sudden after years of touring on our own, and playing bigger shows was incredible. People started saying to me 'Don't rock the boat', but my instinct and desires for what I wanted to achieve in life were telling me that I couldn't continue. I felt like I was doing teenage stuff, like if I'd have kept doing that music that I'd have been like a guy going through a midlife crisis, like he's older but still wants to have a corvette and a pierced ear.



Was Cedric always on the same page when it came to wanting to move on? He definitely was, but I didn't know that because we never talked about it, it was just something that was growing inside both of us. That was probably the biggest fear, telling him 'I'm going to quit this band and start a new band, do you want to come with me?', that was the biggest leap for me. I felt bad about the other guys but Cedric is my childhood friend, we've played together since I was 13 and he's my best friend in the world, so there was a definite fear that he wouldn't be on the same page. Jeremy asked why I was even thinking twice about it because there'd never been a time when Cedric and I hadn't been on the same page. That was the biggest leap for me, taking him to one side on tour and telling him that I didn't feel like we were going anywhere and that I wanted to assemble a whole new set of musicians and do a whole lot more than this, that I wanted to start a new band and wanted him to come with me. He was like 'Oh my God, I feel the same way but I didn't want to let you down and I didn't know how you were feeling'.



There's a sense to your music that it's not overly structured and quite freeform. What is the writing process for you? I think that's my biggest accomplishment, the fact that my music doesn't sound as structured as it is. The songs are very structured, they're very written, all of the parts are written, and it's always a challenge to not make it sound like a science experiment or like what we're accused of sounding like all the time which is a prog band. I love that music but my roots are in punk rock, which comes completely from emotion and instinct, so I go to great efforts to loosen it up and make it sound organic and natural. After being in a band and playing music for so long, I know what to do to make things sound like that, like changing tempos or taking weird turns out of nowhere. On one hand, I'm proud that I can make it sound like that, but on the other hand it's frustrating because it's a common misconception, people saying to me 'It must be so cool being in a band where you just jam in a room and record it', and I'm like 'Fuck, no! There's so much work put into it, so much thought put into the arrangements and how to make an appeasing sound'.



Does that way of working result in a lot of unused experimentation? Yeah, definitely. I have a whole section in the vault of unused songs, unused ideas that I intend to revisit eventually. When I would work in 'professional' studios, they'd get annoyed at the amount of takes that I do because I'm always looking for the arrangement that will make a track sound natural.



You've also put together the Omar Rodriguez Quintet. What does that represent for you that's different to The Mars Volta? I don't differentiate when the material is being written. I'm constantly recording and obsessed with the recording process, and I have a catalogue of songs that I start to pick from and focus in on and say 'OK, these songs are a record'. The songs themselves start to pop out and say 'I belong over here' or 'I should be with this group of songs', and sometimes you get it wrong and realise that a song doesn't belong where you've put it and pull it out. Really, it's to do with organising records, and also about legalities. When I first signed with Universal and they realised how excited I was, the amount I record and how much I wanted to do, that was like a red flag to them. They put into the contract that we could only put out one record a year as The Mars Volta but that I could put out as many additional albums as I wanted if I put them out as a solo artist, so that's where that whole thing started. Like I said, when I'm recording I'm not thinking one way or the other, I'm just thinking about creating different sounds and not doing the same thing over again. Some songs beg to be a Mars Volta song, and others beg to be away from that personality. Every single Mars Volta record is a collection of songs from different time spans; Frances The Mute for example, which was recorded in 2004, it has two songs from 2001, one from 2003, one from 2000 and two from 2004. The fact that I was able to take those songs and make an album that sounds like it was made in the traditional way, to me that's another accomplishment that I'm proud of.



Given the huge amount of material that you're selecting from then, does that become a very time consuming task? Yes and no. The lucky thing for me is that I have a great mental Rolodex when it comes to my music. I can't remember my mother's birthday, I'm not good at math, but I can go 'Oh fuck, I know what song would be perfect' and my engineer will say 'Well where the fuck is that?' and I'll say 'Check the so and so drives, 2006, it would have been Autumn, during rehearsals at Long Beach', and he'll go there and sure enough he'll find the song I was thinking of. For the most part then, it's not as time consuming as you'd think. When I do lose track of something though, then it's a complete nightmare and we have to go through 80 drives of material to find it.



So what else do you have in the pipeline? I'm working on the new releases and figuring out when I'll do a 'solo' tour - it seems so funny calling it a solo tour because my role is no different to when I'm with The Mars Volta. I do everything, I make the music, I'm the leader of the band, Cedric sings on some of my solo tracks, and the tour we're putting together has the same line-up. Cedric is coming with me as well. Again though, because of legalities, it's just easier to do things this way. I always hated the idea when I was younger of solo artists, but now I understand the process and it's worked out good. Hopefully with the next contract, it won't be an issue to put out five Mars Volta records each year.