We Are Scientists' Keith Murray: The New Gay Interview

I are attracted to We Are Scientists. Keith Murray are on the right. (photo from myspace)

We Are Scientists play tomorrow, 8/2, at the Black Cat. Door open at 9.

We Are Scientists fit squarely into the mold set by The Killers and The Bravery, and many others, of New Wave-tinged dancerock that sticks in your head like Hey Mickey. However, WAS sets themselves apart through a refusal to take themselves seriously, letting their goofiness filter through their music and breed likeability in their fans. They're new album Brain Thrust Mastery finds them with a new drummer and a more polished sound, and they're guitar player/vocalist Keith Murray was nice enough to answer some of my questions on the eve of tomorrows show at the Black Cat.

Addendum: I forgot to mention that Oxford Collapse, one of the openers, is pretty fun. It would behoove you show up a little early and check them out.

The New Gay Zack: You're songs tend to be really funny, but also about dating or romantic trouble. Is that humor just a cover for romantic angst?

Keith Murray: I don't think it's a cover, most people have multifaceted personalities. There are some bands who play super morose music who are also morose in life, but I don't think our songs are depressing. They're more nervous than anything else, which fits my personality.

TNG: Your sense of humor comes through in your videos too. Do you come up with your video ideas?

KM: All the video concepts are our ideas. We haven't actually directed any of our videos, but we were centrally involved.

TNG: Do you try to have the plot of your videos match the songs, or are you just being goofy?

KM: We pretty much ignore the songs. "It's a Hit" is boxing video, it's an idiotic pun. But for the most part we try to think of a movie response to make it a musical soundtrack to the video, not necessarily a lyrical one.

TNG: My boyfriend and I have a running debate, so I want you to settle it. The video for Chick Lit, which has you and Chris as cowboys who herd Pomeranians: is that a shout out to "Brokeback Mountain?"

KM: Not intentionally. The fact that it was so closely linked is because it's two cowboys on the range, but the intention was just the joke of cowboys herding dogs.

TNG: The video for After Hours also has a dog in it. Are you both big dog people?

KM: On the last record we got asked if we were cat people, which I definitely was not. I feel more confident saying I like dogs. I wouldn't say there in our videos because we're such tremendous fans that we want to give them representation at all times. The fact is that we just think animals are funny, so an easy way to make something ridiculous is to add an animal. It's a default comedic move.

TNG: This is the last question I'll ask about your videos: Are you as competitive with Chris as the video for "After Hours" would indicate? Do you actually fight over girls?

KM: As will happen any time you get fairly academically minded individuals together there tends to be debates with some frequency. But we rarely fight and never over romantic interests... and not because there's any sort of code between us, but because it worked out that way.

TNG: Does that academic side come out in your songs?

KM: Hopefully not too much. I try not to be secretly academic when writing songs. I try not to over think things when we're working. I would like to think that the breadth of our general interests informs the way we approach things, but I certainly would say there's not an academic approach to our songs.

TNG: What are your academic interests?

KM: Had we not been in the band, most of us would have gone to graduate school. I was a literature major. We're pretty big readers and a big bond between us involves passing around literature. Recently the stuff we've been reading has been base and not of intellectual value. I've read a lot of pulp detective fiction and I can feel the effect its having on my cognitive ability.

TNG: As a band made up of cute guys, do you find that you have a gay fan base? Do you get a lot of interest from your audience?

KM: You mean sexual interest?

TNG: I mean romantic interest. Do you get hit on a lot by your fans?

KM: I think neither of us is a particularly sensual person onstage. Offstage, people meet us and say 'This person's kind of a jerkoff, I'm not interested..." My girlfriend is walking next to me and just laughed and said "That's not true." But I rarely feel sexual aggression from fans.

TNG: What happened to your old drummer Mike Topper? Was there a personality conflict or has he just moved on to greener pastures?

KM: The largest issue was he sort of made a life for himself in LA at the same time that were writing our record in New York, and he didn't like touring that much anyway. It was explicitly obvious. Those things combined and he decided that he would rather not do the touring band thing. As good a job as it generally is, it's fairly grueling in terms of your social and emotional life. It pretty much destroys your life. He decided he had a good thing going in LA.

TNG: Did his departure have anything to do with how your sound has changed since the last album?

KM: I think the fact that he wasn't really involved left us free to do things he might have objected to. We recorded this record three years after last one, for our sound to remain the same would have been incredibly pathetic. I mostly chalk it up to the fact that we're people to whom music is part of our daily lives, so to still be playing the same thing two and half years later would certainly indicate that we were in a pretty nasty rut.

TNG: How do you respond to fans who say that you're sounds has gotten more glossy or radio friendly or more like The Killers?

KM: I feel like the more you read things people say, the more contradictory it sounds. The first record people were saying "Hey, how's it going, Killers ripoff?" And now for other people to say "Suddenly they sound like The Killers" strikes me as almost bordering on absurd. I give zero credence to anything anybody says when they're publicly digesting pop music.

TNG: So you don't think you've gotten glossier?

KM: Certainly the production was glossier. The last record was recorded essentially live in two weeks and this was recorded piece by piece, with instruments that weren't part of the band before, over the course of five weeks. We'd been playing the songs on that last record the exact same way we recorded them for five years and it got incredibly boring. We were definitely interested in not deciding, for arbitrary reasons, that because I play guitar and Chris plays bass and Mike drums those would be the only things we allow on our records, production be damned. We were interested in making a record that wasn't just those basic instruments.

TNG: We Are Scientists has always been much bigger in the England than it is here. Any ideas about why that is?

KM: I think England's mainstream radio stations and MTV lean more towards the type of music we do. Whereas in The States, despite that a lot of indie records have been charting here, indie doesn't get played on the radio. I think the fact that we were on the radio and on MTV overseas has made us a bigger band there than we are here. Once that started happening we started spending more time over there to cultivate that.

TNG: Do you think you'll ever be as big here as you are over there?

KM: To be honest, it all strikes me as pretty arbitrary. I guess we're lucky or whatever that somebody at a radio station liked us and started playing us. I've heard bands there that I thought would be huge and weren't, and vice versa. To play to play prevaricator on that is beyond me. I have no convictions that there are any logical means of deciding what will and will not actually work. TNG