How did you transition from The Body, The Blood and The Machine to your new album, Now We Can See? Especially with The Body being such a politically charged album? Were you leery of becoming pegged as a “political band”?
Hutch: I tend to be a bit obsessive, and we were obsessed about politics and religion with the last record, so this record is really obsessed with death. You know, Kathy and I were just thinking about death a lot. I think that a lot of creative people do. A lot of art is just about death, a lot of television and film, so you can’t get away from it. And at the same time, it’s something that is really scary. No matter if we’re atheists or agnostics, or somewhere between, it’s something we’re afraid of. I would like to think that it is therapeutic in a way, to sing about death, to get over the fear of it. But I’m not sure that actually works, but either way, I think it makes for interesting lyrics. We’ve just being always trying to have lyrics in this band that are a step above—something more than just jukebox songs.

The lyrics have always been one of the strongest draws for The Thermals, and you seem to pull off a certain punk rock ethos without getting too preachy...Is that a concern that you have? Not getting too far immersed in an issue that you become a pseudo-political spokes-band?

I don’t want to get up on a soapbox, and that’s not what The Body, The Blood... was about. It was about storytelling and it was a work of fiction. It was about singing what we were afraid of. I don’t want to get up there and be like, “I’m smarter than everyone else in this room. I know more about these topics. I’m gonna tell you what.” It’s not supposed to be like that. And also, we were starting to get pigeon holed as a political band, and we’re not. I wouldn’t even describe myself as a political person. It’s more like this is a story that we told. And there was just no way that we could live in Bush’s America without it affecting us and affecting the art that we make. So it was just natural, but we don’t want to get stuck with people thinking of us just as a political band because it’s really limiting.

Album: Now We Can See

With that being said, do you have any songs on the new album that you consider to be as “heavy” or as “poignant” as “Our Power Doesn’t Run On Nothing”?
I think that all the songs are light with heavy touches, or heavy with a light attitude. We were trying to keep our sense of humor about things. We were trying to make a record that was less heavy, and in some ways it is, and in some ways it is heavier and more of a downer as far as subject matter. So, I can’t really think of one song in particular, but maybe “How We Fade.” There’s a lot of gravity to that song...it’s dealing with the reality, or the belief, that one day the people you love the most, you won’t see them anymore. When I sing that one it definitely hits me harder than a lot of the others.

One that stands out in my mind, is “We Were Sick.” Is that meant as a tounge-in-cheek shoulder shrug of an explanation of what happened during the last 4-8 years?

Well, I think it’s more than a shoulder shrug. It’s meant to be more arrogant. That song is actually meant to be a follow-up to Our Power Doesn’t Run On Nothing. I had imagined if Bush and Cheney were writing punk rock songs with the same attitude that they had been running the country...with no apologies for it. We were singing about the human race, or people in power, and being sick in the head. This is how humans are, they are selfish and they do terrible things all the time. They are sick. And that’s why we say “we.”

Do you ever worry about “the message” being lost in the melody or “fun-ness” of the songs?
It’s fine with you. We perform those songs so many times that we can’t go out there every time and be like, “Oooh, this is this heavy message!” That again, would be arrogant, and it’s just fine with me that people can take it just as fun songs on the surface. There are tons of bands that I like that I have no idea what they are singing about. A lot of times people will take things from songs that you had no intention of conveying, and that’s a beautiful thing about the art. It’s open to interpretation. That’s the problem when people sit around and explain their art too much, because it is more about what people can take out of it on their own. I don’t need to be here telling people what they should get out of it.

Looking back on some of The Thermals older records and your own personal recordings from the past, what do you think about the new “lo-fi” movement that seems to be taking off with bands like Wavves, Vivian Girls, Times New Viking, etc.? Have you considered dusting off some of your 4 track recordings and getting them out there for this new crowd?
We did all of the demos for this record on 4 track and 8 track cassette machines, and we’re planning on getting those out there in some way or another, either as singles or on our MySpace page or something. We definitely have some fans that really appreciate the lo-fi recordings and would appreciate them more than the more produced recordings, and those are out there for them. I’ve been thinking of putting out a lo-fi version of the record for those fans, but like any band we want to progress and we thought it would get sort of dull if we just kept making all of our records on the 4 track. It’s pretty limiting, but at the same time I still love the lo-fi stuff. I like Times New Viking because when they put out a new album you think it’s going to be cleaner, but it’s actually dirtier than the last one. That Vivian Girls album sounds really great. But this whole thing isn’t new, and it wasn’t new when we were doing it. It reminds me of albums that were coming out in the early 90’s. Like Tiger Trap, or other punk bands taking the sounds of the 60’s and putting a twist on it. It’ll be interesting to see what those bands do in the future. We used to describe the 4 track as being the 5th member of the band, but it’s a challenge to go into a bigger studio.

I like lo-fi recording because it can hide a lot of your mistakes, but when you go into a studio it’s all really big and in your face, and you have to play better. But that’s also what’s so cool about lo-fi is the attitude that it’s OK to be loud and sloppy.

It’s also nice to have bands around still who keep it stripped down to 3 or 4 members, instead of a chorus of any and every one they know.
Yeah, less members, less everything. I’m just really interested in writing more than anything. Even more than playing. I’m not really interested in “chops,” I’m just interested in songs. In my definition, even if you’re a loud rock band you should be able to pick up an acoustic guitar or sit at a piano and play the same chords and be able to communicate. A lot of The Thermals is as minimalist as we can get. We start off a lot of the time with a simple structure and then ask, “How can we use even less?” A lot of the bands we look up to, like Nirvana with most people my age, some of their songs are so incredibly simple, but so effective. That song Sappy, or what used to be called Verse Chorus Verse, we’ve been loving that and playing that lately. It’s so simple and you just repeat the same progression and it’s so simple and it really works. As technology moves forward quicker and quicker, it’s awesome to have bands going back to tape machines and using Pro Tools on their laptop, not to make over produced stuff, but just to make lo-fi.

1