RSSBodytonic Meets: Cold War Kids
It has almost been four years since Cold War Kids released their debut album, Robbers and Cowards. Now on their third album, Louise Bruton talks to CWK's frontman, Nathan Willett about the new release, life on the road and how they met.
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When Californian quartet Cold War Kids released Robbers and Cowards in 2007, tracks like 'Hang Me Out To Dry' and 'We Used To Vacation' were a welcome addition to the nu rave clones that were dominating the scene at the time.
Lead singer Nathan Willett feels that while their music lies within the indie/rock genre, he has started describing the band's sound as "soul punk", taking influence from a range of artists like Velvet Underground, Joy Division and Nina Simone.
Mine Is Yours, their third installment of "soul punk" has veered away from the fictional narrative that was so vividly present on their last two albums as the band shift focus to the stories that present themselves through their family and friends.
"I think the first one [Robbers and Cowards] is more fictional and narrative with elements of my real life but Mine Is Yours is much more about my real life with little sprinkles of fictional narrative. It's more journalism than fiction like the previous."
Willett says that they took a different approach to making this album. "The first two albums we just spent a week or two recording and we recorded them very live. This last album we spent a couple of months or more really making everything perfect. Attempting to kind of make everything as good as it could be for the first time whereas before we just embraced the spontaneity and the error in everything."
"It's a much more celebratory and the characters' perspectives are more mature. It's also crossing over that point of being 30 and accepting certain things and trying to find joy."
The band wrote the album between tours and as Willett says, it was during this time that band saw how their college friends really lived.
"With touring for five years, we were home for the first time during the writing of this record for a good stretch and we got to unwind and reconnect with old friends we went to college with and ‘really’ see how they were in relationships and it became a theme for this record."
'Louder Than Ever' and 'Bulldozer' deal specifically with broken-down relationships and 'Sensitive Kid' tackles the freedom that Willett has as a kid when his single mother went out on dates. When their back-catalogue contains an aspect of story-telling, particularly in songs like 'Saint John' that dealt with a man's confession on death row, the introspective on Mine Is Yours stands out from their previous work.
"At the very start [of the record] I knew that I wanted that to scare me a little bit. It's almost like, there's a certain kind of riskiness that comes with knowing that people in your life will hear certain things and maybe not like it. It's almost a statement for me to say, I'm an artist and this is what I'm going to write about, my life as I see it and how it affects people."
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