Humdrum

Humdrum: Did you grow up in New Orleans?

Paul Meany:  I did.

Humdrum: How do you feel that influenced your music?

Paul Meany: That’s a good question and it’s really tough to know.  Really the biggest   influence growing up in New Orleans would be groove.  My dad is a musician and I think my dad bringing me up with his musical collection, which was probably more direct, and then New Orleans once I began to play around the city more.

I went to the art school that New Orleans, which actually is a great thing. For high school students they have this, it’s called NOCCA, New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts and you’d audition for the school and if you get in, you’d spend a half a day at your school and then you’d go half a day studying music with some of the greats.

Humdrum: Do you still live in New Orleans?

Paul Meany: Yes, so it’s a traditional place to come up and be exposed to the music there that, you know...I have to be honest that I really began grow more of an appreciation for the true homegrown New Orleans traditional music in recent years.

As a teenager, I’d follow the trends but as I began to travel the world, I guess you appreciate your roots a lot more once you get away from them.

Anyway, with this record it was really important for me and for the whole band that we wanted to do this in New Orleans.  We knew the music that we wanted to capture on record was dripping in the air down in New Orleans. In some way this whole record is kind of paying homage to New Orleans and in how our band came up with it.

Humdrum: I once heard Billy Joel say in an interview that piano/keyboard players and drummers share a common bond because both of their instruments are percussive. Do you think that’s true?

Paul Meany: Yeah, absolutely. I actually started on drums. Sense of time carries through a bunch of instruments. Guitar really can be and should be just as percussive as piano, drums, bass and the way our band is whatever we get our hands on usually becomes some kind of percussion instrument just by playing it improperly, as we tend to do.

Humdrum: When you’re writing with Darren is there a give and take on the creation of the drum parts then?

Paul Meany: Yeah, that’s kind of the DNA from the band from the very beginning, sort of this creative chemistry that me and Darren were finding as we were bouncing ideas of each other that was just working, and we knew something was happening, so we just kind of tried to vow to each other that we would try to continue to let it work and see where we’d take it. As Greg joined the band and Roy joined the band, the creative pool got deeper. That was really the challenge of this record, we tried to exercise a creative democracy.

Now when I say creative democracy I don’t mean where everyone gets equal say in how a song goes instead I think the philosophy we tried to keep making this record was best idea wins and it doesn’t matter who comes up with it.  The tough thing was, we wanted everyone to like it, and that was the creative democracy part. We would like everyone to like the music we were coming up with, even if it wasn’t their idea that made the final cut. That’s what causes a lot of tension.

Yeah, it’s difficult for me to be excited about the best vocal part if I didn’t come up with it. Same thing for bass, drums whatever.  That was the thing, we wanted everyone to have the freedom to express whatever they felt to make the song better, even it did not have to do with their own instrument. So I think in the end it produced a better record than any of us could have dreamed up on our own.  Definitely there were painful moments to get there.

Making a record can really be a battle of egos.... that’s what it is the whole time. If you can somehow get through the cesspool of ego, you can hopefully have a good record in the end.

Humdrum: I know you’ve had a difficult time making Armistice, but I was talking about it with a friend of mine and he observed that you may have avoided the sophomore jinx because in the process you wrote an entire album, scrapped it and started from scratch, making this kind of your third album.

Paul Meany: Maybe, it’s a good point. The true sophomore album got shelved.

Lucky us.

Humdrum: It was tough to do I guess.

Paul Meany: It was tough pill to swallow too man, it wasn’t very easy because we immediately realized the repercussions of that. We were on a budget, we had a certain time allotted, trying to get the record done and then having the moment we realized we don’t like any one of these songs that we thought we did. Let’s start over. We definitely signed on with the right producer (Dennis Herring) to help get us over that hump and we actually had a blast.

 We wound up going from what was probably the most frustrating time in this band to probably the most inspirational.  It was actually great walking in to the studio every day not having a clue what we were going to do and just holding out the basket and catching the songs that would fall out of the air. It was a good time.

Humdrum: Were there any particular keyboard players that you were into or influenced you while you were learning your instrument?

Paul Meany: I’ve never really been into keyboard players to be quite honest. I’ve always been more into drummers. I’m a frustrated drummer.  That’s what I am.

Humdrum: Darren mentioned earlier that you have a lot of opinions about the drums....

Paul Meany: Yeah, and Darren’s learned to make his peace with that. I think we get along ok, but I think he kind of realizes, ok, here’s Paul, frustrated drummer guy....when I listen to songs, it’s hard for me to get excited about a song no matter how good it is, if the drums don’t move me. So I’m fortunate to be in a band with a great drummer who has great taste in drum sounds and beats, so that helps.

Humdrum: It seems like the two of you feed off of each other live and on record, do you think that popular music has moved away from the stylistic drummers that used to influence the overall sound of bands.  Like, for example Stewart Copeland from The Police?

Paul Meany: Those were the bands usually stand out. When I think of some of the great bands that I’ve liked over the years they usually had that kind of drummer. Stewart Copeland, John Bonham, Keith Moon, even a Ringo Starr just transcended just doing their part but brought that very important piece of the puzzle and without it it’s just an incomplete picture. Darren is definitely that for this band, but even beyond drums, Darren is a maestro composer when it comes to programming, sampling and comes up with tons of ideas on that tip too, which benefits our music a lot.

Humdrum: So you once said in an interview that Darren was genetically engineered near a small Siberian town and that you found him on Ebay. Which leads me to....

                      Five Totally Random Questions With Paul Meany

1) Aside from Darren, what is the strangest thing you’ve ever bought online?

Fingernail Clippers, I was trapped on the road, I had no way to do it and I had to     get them mailed to the next location.

2) Have you ever been attacked by a wild animal?

Do girlfriends count?

3) What is your motto?

    I’ll give you favorite quote, “ I hate quotations, tell me something you know”

4) When the world is running down, do you make the best of what’s still around?

    Absolutely.

5) How would you rate your Humdrumonline experience today?

A) kick drum, b) snare drums, c) tom, d) tambourine

Tambourine.

Humdrum: Is that good?

Paul Meany: Absolutely, come see the show and watch what we do with the tambourine. Tambourines and hand claps, that was the new found joy of this latest record.





Mike Flaherty - Drummer (and Director of Content for Humdrum online)