Music as escape

I haven't been using music as emotionally as I used to. When I was younger, I would hide in music and use it as an escape. 

It's hard right now. I consider myself to be an informed, news-obsessed person, so as far as the whole situation our country is in and the entire world is in, I'm not getting comfort from much.

Depression from anxiety

For the last five years I've had a sense that things are going downhill. My anxiety used to focus on myself. I used to get depression from my anxiety if that makes any sense, and I think part of getting better was learning just to take the blame off of myself, so I focus a lot on global anxiety, not personal anxiety. "Around The Bend" [by Strata] was written in December of last year, so before the pandemic hit. We talked as a band about the concept lyrically, and I would tell the guys I had a really bad feeling, and I want to write about this really bad feeling like something's going to get way worse before it gets better around here. I didn't know there was going to be a pandemic but I definitely had the feeling that some really bad shit was coming.

So "Around The Bend," I'm asking if this is the end. There's no metaphor there, that's just an actual question.

Writing "Around The Bend" after dropping Ryan Hernandez off at airport

Ryan just spits out song ideas constantly. He has hundreds of them, so he'll give me a folder that I put on a USB stick and then I put that in my car stereo so when I'm driving around, these instrumentals are just always on and I can grab my phone and hit the voicenotes, and if the music's loud enough and I'm singing loud enough you get this decent demo mix.

So I dropped Ryan off and it was probably a half hour that I had this melody in my head and it happened to just plop perfectly on there. I had to adjust the timing of it but before he was even on the plane he was getting the verse and the section leading into the chorus of this new song he showed me a half an hour ago. It's strange how that happens sometimes.

We had our friend Lam in the studio with us and the whole band was there to do these kind of gang vocal backups, so we had one mic that everyone was sharing and then I had a mic in my hand and I just curled up on the floor and said, "I don't know what I'm going to say, but I'm going to try to capture this feeling."

I had them open up their phones and whatever your most recent text was, scream that over and over just to get a texture of noise. Then after the first take I was yelling about ice caps melting and politicians not giving a shit about us and like, "We're going to die," and they were like, "OK, see you soon."

So I think everyone realizes, "Wait a minute, I have anxiety too. I'm scared of stuff too. I want to scream things that matter to me, so let's erase that take and start over." So it ended up being six people times three or four takes and I just happened to be the loudest because I was screaming into this microphone. 

We kind of buried our little secrets in that bridge. We all had sore throats after that because we were all yelling and we did it for a while. It was therapeutic for sure because we all shared that feeling of, "Yeah, things are getting crazy. This is weird."

Twitter

On Twitter, I'm kind of a troll. My wife Shannon doesn't have Twitter but she understands what I use it for. I just use it to yell at the president and to yell at Republicans and some Democrats all day. And I yell at the guy from Trapt all the time because I hate him [laughs]. 

I called the Kamala Harris and Joe Biden ticket back in 2017, so if it's useless predictions on Twitter, I got you. Actual life advice, not so much.

Bowling for fans

In the early 2000s, Strata had to call off a tour when Eric had vocal chord issues. When the band drove back home they threw bowling parties at the cancelled tour stops.

I feel like we were ahead of our time with that kind of connecting with fans. That was before this era of transparency where the curtain falls and there's nothing to divide the fans and the artist. Even huge pop stars like Halsey and Yungblud communicate on a daily basis with their fans directly, which is the way it is now, but in the early 2000s, it was still not like that yet. If anything we were almost discouraged by the record label because hanging out with fans was like breaking the fourth wall and ruining the mystique. 

But our band has always felt that if you like what we're doing, we have something in common right off the bat, and then there's only up from there. I feel like that's an analogy for Americans, like a divided nation needs to come together on what we have in common.

I didn't get to do the bowling trip because I had to stay in New York to see a specialist. The guys didn't want to just drive straight home, so they broke up their drive and stayed the night in a few cities all the way from New York back to California. Why not make it fun and still have an opportunity to see the fans who didn't get to come to a show?

This was back in the MySpace days when it wasn't as easy. We didn't have Instagram and Twitter and these things to connect with people, but they managed to put together these little bowling parties because we're all into The Big Lebowski and bowling was on our minds all the time and our bass player is an incredible bowler.

At the time it was a controversial thing in our little corner of the industry because rock and roll bands weren't supposed to hang out with their fans unless they're drinking with them, so I thought that was one of the cool things we did early on.

Eric with Strata

"Internet Killed The Video Star"

I think of it as a twin song with "Very Busy People," which is probably strange because it doesn't seem like they're related but they're both in my opinion a pretty decent snapshot of what it felt like to be beginning a new decade where suddenly your little media universe that you're the center of was a new thing, and how it applied to bands and artists was confusing to me. I don't think I'm the most modest person in the world, but I'm definitely not super comfortable with begging for attention constantly or the image of the rock star being this untouchable god on a stage.

I wrote an essay at that same time that was imagining The Beatles in the studio, but they all have iPhones and social media, and they're trying to get some work done. It's not four or five people all collaborating and working together, it's four or five people all begging each other to put your phone down and focus. I imagined John, Paul, Ringo and George all fucking around on Instagram and Twitter instead of working on their harmonies or figuring out that middle eight, and their producer getting upset. So "Very Busy People" was about being stuck on this feeling that what you're doing is really important. Like, "I gotta check these likes on my post," or "I gotta respond to this comment." It's important to you because you're addicted to these little moments of new information popping in and you're addicted to the attention.

The way that applies to "Internet Killed The Video Star" is, I came from the very last period of rock and roll bands that were like, "Let's get in a van and play some dirty-ass clubs to 50 people a night and let's do that for years and build a following." With The Limousines, I didn't even know this guy [Giovanni Giusti], but he sent me some music and I sang on it. We put it on MySpace, I made up a name for the band, and all of a sudden there's people paying attention to us.

I would record a little bit and then without even sending it to Gio I'd put it on MySpace and make it downloadable, so he would hear my version of the song we were working on at the same time as the early Limos fans.

I remember the very first fan of The Limousines who was not a person I knew. It was this girl named Kayla, and it was crazy. I was like, "Hey Gio, we have a fan." We had a person who was actively into this group that we formed. 

You had Sirius Alt-Nation and you had our radio station here in San Francisco both downloading stuff off our MySpace and putting it on the radio when we weren't even a band. Strata was still in my head - I had left but not because I didn't like those guys, I just didn't like that part of the business and I didn't want to be in a band anymore. I wanted to have a regular life at home and make music with some dude on the computer, and then they both ended up kind of becoming the same thing.

The Skrillex model

Sonny Moore, who became Skrillex, he was the middle act on a three-band tour, which was the last Strata tour that we did in December of 2007. And I remember watching that kid go from just being a dude in a band to quitting his band, being a solo artist, and then becoming an EDM superstar. For me it has always been weird to see four or five guys on a stage sweating it out versus one guy standing on a stage pushing the spacebar and millions of people being into it. So the kids are disco dancing, they're tired of rock and roll. That was my observation at that particular time. Maybe it was okay to be two people, neither of which can really play instruments. I'm a shitty guitar player and Gio's good at what he does, but he's a studio guy - he doesn't remember how he played something and he doesn't care because he's not a live musician. 

I was trying to illustrate that feeling like the rules don't matter with music and with rock and with genres in general.

Living in the connected age

I think that our anxiety levels are probably all raised a little bit because we all hear every scary noise now. Imagine it's a dark night in the woods and you're in a tent. You hear a twig cracking and you think a bear's coming, so you get scared and imagine everyone hearing the same noise at the same time and everyone getting scared. I feel like that's what happens with us all being on our phones all the time.

We're sharing grief and we're sharing fear all at the same time. I think that can be really good but it can also be bad if it's weaponized. Ten years ago when I was writing about this, I really felt like I was explaining how I thought it was gonna be or maybe I was observing how I thought it already was, but I didn't look at it as making predictions, but it's crazy how it's just completely normal now to be the person I was describing in "Very Busy People" - the air traffic controller with all this important information pouring in at all times of the day. It's exponential now.

If you had to pick one band to listen to the rest or your life

Radiohead, because they were so important to me growing up. OK Computer is the most perfect album ever made. There's so many songs on there that I wish I wrote.

Another song I wish I wrote is "Still In Love" by the band Nothing More. They're from Texas. It does seem like I wrote it - there is this kind of despair, and it's a song about love but it's not necessarily casting more good light or bad light, it's just describing the complexity of it. 

Lyric vs. Melody

What's more important to the success of the song is the melody, one hundred percent. I feel like I know this from personal experience because I feel like I have struck gold a couple times on some lyrics I've written but I've never been super strong with melody, so a song like "Stay Young" from Strata or "The Future" by The Limousines are lyrics that stand up to among the best but I'm not the best with melody. That's the thing I wish I learned. I wish I learned how to be more melodic and to think more about the melody of the song.

So if you're going for success, it's melody. If you're going for ability to articulate an idea then it's the lyric.

The song "Last Dance"

I was in a different relationship that I was writing about back then and the people around us were asking if we were OK because these lyrics sounded like we were broken up or something. And even she was asked by friends, like, "Have you heard the lyrics to Eric's new stuff? It's basically breaking up with you in a song."

I'm really proud of that melody-wise, and lyrically I feel like I captured what it's like to know that you're in a relationship that's over but hasn't been declared dead quite yet.

Usually with my lyrics if you have to ask if it's about hope or despair, it's usually despair. I say it so I don't have to think it anymore. I guess just to get it out of my head.

I have found a way of living better in my head and being happier with who I am - I'm not full of despair anymore. But I am certainly full of stress and anxiety. I'm looking for hope constantly and I think everyone is. I think people on the other side politically of the divide we're living in are feeling the exact same way, they're just thinking in a language we don't speak. So I love them and I hope they love the rest of us. My hope is that we're not as stupid as we think we are.

September 2, 2020
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