WWR: In terms of record labels, do you think they are necessary any more?
Rory: I don't think they are necessary but it all depends on what your trying to do, we've discussed not dealing with labels any more, but we haven't had that time where we want to deal with all the stuff, for us its sort of laziness or convenience you know
John: its sort of just a nice home base for us now, record sales are going down every year, your on a label to make records and to make them available your not always on there to sell records any more some people still do, but it can serve as a nice home base where if someone wants to interview your band they can contact your label, and the label can then contact you its just a nice hub of communications, otherwise we'd have to take many many hours out of our personal lives but some bands do it, like the do-nots from Germany run their own label and do everything themselves, and the band is kind of all they do but we have always valued our sort of other stuff going on.
WWR: sure, also 'normal' people think that a band on fat wreck chords could stand to make a lot of money but don't realise you need to have normal jobs also..
John: Yes, but the only people who understand that are people in other bands or people who do shows, you know we don't just go home and go on vacation in Mexico, we go home and go back to work
Rory: Even the bands who do make a living doing it, the perception is so inflated because the bands who do make a living from it make such a modest living they might as well be school teachers
John: unless your like green day
Rory: yea unless you have a top 40 song your lucky to make a living off of it, so yea we have always worked.
WWR: Some of your lyrics seem very personal, is this the way you feel you can send your message out to other bands and so forth by listening to the records as opposed to bitching on the internet on some forum or blog?
Rory: definitely
John: sure I can see what your getting at, we are one of the more private bands that I can think of. A lot of bands are every other day blog update or video update and all over the internet and reveal every detail of their personal lives and we have a layer of...it sounds hard to say but I think we let our music speak for ourselves and let the music be what we are saying. We reluctantly do the self promotion thing, a lot of bands love it they cant wait to update their Myspace page and that's fine that's great and maybe it would be to our benefit to do that more but none us really enjoy that. We don't set out to be private but we just are a lot more private people than people generally are.
WWR: Are there any songs from the last two albums which have a favourite subject?
Rory: not a favourite subject necessarily but for me its sort of it comes out whether its political or personal I don't really sit and think I am going to write a song about this or this album should be like this I just let it come out, for me my favourite songs on our record are the ones we are playing at the moment because its fun to perform those songs, once they're written they get passed to the venting process before I bring them in to show the band, you know I feel on the newest record that the lyrics are simplistic and sometimes a little too tongue in cheek but im not afraid of being almost silly since I feel we have such a large catalogue that its neither here or there so its never representative of our work in one way we can get away with a little low brow.
WWR: anything in terms of future releases?
Rory: I think FAT are releasing some demo's aren't they?
John: who?
Rory: FAT
John : ow cool, laughs* ha I usually find out what we are doing from the internet, nothing major we haven't done much U.S touring on this record. There might be a few digital releases of old 7 inches that weren't available and maybe an under the influence split with the gaslight anthem where we both cover songs we like.
Huge thanks to American Steel, Ed the Duck & Wiebke at FAT for the interview
American Steel – 'Dear friends and gentle hearts' is Available now on fatwreckchords
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