Making Moves: An Interview With Justin Pierre of Motion City Soundtrack

January 30, 2012

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Justin Pierre of Motion City Soundtrack and the next 45 minutes produced one of the most interesting interviews I’ve ever done. From the 4 Albums, 2 Nights tour, to their upcoming album, and even their exciting new project with Drexel University, there was never a dull moment. Check out the interview below.

Hi, my name is Justin Pierre. I play guitar and sing in the band Motion City Soundtrack. Yayyyy!!

How would you describe your genre to people who had never listened to your music before?

I don’t know, I just kind of tell people that we’re a rock band. I think a lot of people think of us as “pop-punk.” That is the phrase that gets thrown at us and I think that’s because we spent many years on Warped Tour, playing Warped Tour and we’ve sort of been associated with bands that have also had that label, whether it’s Blink 182, The All American Rejects, or Fall Out Boy, you know those are the sort of bands we went on tour with. So I don’t know. It neither pisses me off nor excites me, that label –pop-punk. I mean it is what it is and if people want to call us that, that’s cool with me. But I usually say “I’m in a rock band,” because that’s very generic and just sort of the simple answer.

What got you into music, originally?

Man, I don’t know. I guess this could be totally crazy. I think I was always a fan of music, it was always around my house. I know my dad had a lot of records and as a small child, wearing diapers, he has pictures of me listening to headphones of his Beach Boys albums and Beatles albums and stuff. So I think I’ve always listened to music but as far as playing music, I sadly attempted to play the saxophone when I was in grade school and it was not so good. But I had this friend who played guitar and we were both into Metallica so we decided to start a metal band where he played guitar and I played sax and it didn’t go so well. But, yeah I think it was kind of, I’ll have to say Metallica made me want to play guitar. So this was around the time, before the album “End Justice For All” but somewhere around there was when I got a guitar and I basically just taught myself how to play by reading their tablature books. So I learned how to play guitar to Metallica tablature books. And then I just, I don’t know, I started playing and in high school I got into different music, I guess it would be considered alternative but it was more of the weird, indie music that sort of blew up in the wake of Nirvana blowing up. So bands like Superchunk, Pavement, Pixies, Nirvana, Jawbox, Fugazi, things of that sort throughout high school. Then after that I ended up, I had one high school band that was pretty good and we ended up playing like in Duluth, Minneapolis, and St. Paul, Minnesota - those three places. And I ended up playing a lot of shows with a band that Josh Cain, who’s the guitarist in Motion City Soundtrack, was in. So we sort of became friends that way and then when our bands broke up we ended up forming Motion City Soundtrack in 1997. So that’s kind of how I got to be in Motion City Soundtrack.

When you spoke to our class you mentioned that you were really focused on your filmmaking and didn’t really think of Motion City Soundtrack as your main project. What was the turning point where you realized that MCS was really going to be something big?

I feel like probably when we made our first record was the first moment, where I thought, “Wow, this record actually sounds really good.” So I was really excited but I still kind of was hoping to do movies as well and then it wasn’t until somewhere around the third record where I decided that… Yeah, because I think that after the third record I made two more short films and then after I did that I was like, “You know what, I should just focus on music until people stop listening to this band.” You know, just kind of play it out until it’s done and then I can always make movies when I’m older, or try to. And I feel like there’s this magic number “30” that most film directors want to make a feature film before their 30, and I had already passed that age mark, so it was kind of like me putting off that dream for a few more years and who knows? I don’t think I’m as good at writing screenplays or making films, be they short or long… I’ve only got one feature film that I’ve actually finished, out of like 17 that are any good, and that’s just writing, not making. The music thing is going much better for me and I just started to appreciate it more I think when we went in to write our fourth record, I got really excited again. So for like the first two records I was into it, but then I just kind of got lazy I think somewhere between the finishing of the second record and the beginning of the fourth record. So, yeah. I don’t know if I answered your question….

You didn’t! I’ve never been more…

Humiliated in all my life.

Right, right. So what artists would you say inspire you the most?

Currently, or in the past, or just in general?

Whatever you think best describes you.

Well, I feel like… I don’t know if you’d be able to tell but I’m a big fan of the storytellers as far as musicians, so like Ben Folds is one that I really like. I like the way he tells stories. I’d have to say that my favorite all-time musician is Tom Waits even though his voice is very different from mine, but I love his choice of words. He uses words that I’d never heard of before or he puts together words in a way that kind of reminds me… I mean I didn’t grow up during the whole “deep” generation or that whole thing, but he feels like he could have lived in that time. I don’t know, he’s a master of words and I don’t think I’m authentically talented. I think I have to work at it, so I definitely am looking up words and trying to figure out what makes sense. I have an idea of what I want to say, but how can I say it in an interesting way. There’s a guy by the name of Dell the Funky Homosapien who I think he had a line that said, “I find a new way to say whatever’s clever,” and I always liked that line. I feel like I tend to sing the same song over and over, you know, variations of that. You have to come up with new words in order to do that otherwise it would be really boring. So yeah, Tom Waits, Ben Folds. I really like Pavements, Steven Malkmus. I don’t understand what he’s singing at all, ever but I like his word choices. It’s just really strange. Another guy who’s just brilliant is Robert Paller from Guided by Voices. I’m gonna go with those. Oh, and also Karen Carpenter! She’s one of my favorites as well. She writes amazingly sad and depressing songs that are kind of disguised as pop songs and I feel like I really latched on to that because I think that’s kind of what we do, a little bit. On the outside it seems a lot more positive, I mean it’s not negative or anything, but it just seems more happy on the outside and on the inside it’s just a little darker.

We talked briefly about the 4 Albums, 2 Nights tour earlier. What was that like?

That was awful! [Laughing] No, it was strenuous. That would be the word I would use. I recently… Okay, I don’t even know where begin with that. I was gonna say something that’s really weird. But there was a movie I saw called, “What the Bleep Do We Know?!” and it was in conjunction with a book I’d heard people talking about that said if you think something, it will happen. It will manifest for you. I saw this movie that was based in science and was basically saying that when you’re depressed your body is sending out more “sad cells” than usual so there aren’t enough “sad receptors” for the signals to attach themselves to, therefore next time the body regenerates it can create more sad receptors, telling your body to create more sad signals and it’s just a vicious cycle. I don’t even remember what the original question was but I’m just gonna keep going on this story. Anyone can basically tell themselves something, whether it’s true or fake, and their body will react to that, physically. After seeing that and thinking about it, because I’d heard what I thought of as all these wack jobs walking around the street saying, “I’m gonna manifest my own destiny,” and it just seemed so goofy to me. But when I think about it on a… I’m not talking about, “I want a new car! I’m gonna make it happen by thinking about it!” That’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is just having a positive mental attitude even though you may not feel that way, just to fake it. It’s like playing pretend, it’s like acting. If you can act your way out of being sad, or whatever you’re feeling and just put positive vibes out into the world and into yourself, you’re more apt to become positive in the long-run. It’s just really hard to do in reality. Anyways, I don’t remember what the original question was.

It was about the 4 Albums, 2 Nights tour.

Oh… wow. Oh! What I meant was that it was strenuous and I was going to say that I have a temperamental voice and I have a hard time singing. I was going to make up all these excuses about how I’m a bad singer but what I should really say is that I should tell myself that I’m a great singer and maybe my voice will get better, because I’ll just think it. Anyways the point is that in the past I’ve had a really hard time singing more than 45 minutes to an hour. 4 Albums, 2 Nights… it was very strenuous for my voice so I don’t know that I’d want to do it again, in theory. It was a lot of fun, I’d rather do when this next album comes out 5 shows in 5 nights. For me, I’d be more able to do that and then just take off like 2 days and basically spend a week in each city and go to a bunch of cities, in small venues. That’d be a lot of fun. Yes, it was a fun time, very hard to sing but it was a lot of fun. And the people who were there really wanted to be there because it was very costly as far as typical ticket sales go, it was more expensive.

Can you tell us a little bit about the upcoming album?

It’s amazing and you all should buy at least a dozen copies! And don’t spend some second-rate ticket price for that stuff! You should buy the full-rate ticket price, enjoy the ride! I don’t know where I’m going with this…. I think that the record, I’m really proud of it. The new album was a lot of fun to do. For the first time in a long time we didn’t have a label. We didn’t even send music to any of our managers or anything, no demos, no anything. We just got together in a room and we started writing songs, we started sending songs back and forth to each other via email, because we all live in different cities across the US. And we just started there and we wrote upwards to almost 100 ideas probably and about 25-30 songs. When we went into the studio we just kind of picked whatever song we wanted to work on and started there. We never really had a plan, it wasn’t thought out like, “These are the songs we’re going to record,” we just kind of picked whatever song we felt like that day and then when we finished that song we’d go to a new song and go back and forth or maybe someone would come up with something in the studio and we’d be like “Oh, I like this idea! Where can we go from there,” and we’d just feel it out. We worked with a guy named Ed Ackerson whose in a really cool band with his wife right now called BLNX and they put out four song albums every 3 months. It’s really cool what he’s been doing. I’m not sure if he’s going to continue that but it’s really interesting music, it’s super fun. And he was in a band called Polara in the 90’s which was one of my favorite bands from Minnesota. He’s from the same small town I’m from so he was kind of like my idol growing up. So to get to work with him is really cool because I think he’s just one of my favorite musicians, and as a guy he’s totally down-to-earth and really cool and he’s not larger than life. I mean, in some ways he is but in getting to know him, he’s not anymore. Everybody’s just humans but some of them you look up to more than others. So we did it with Ed Ackerson and we’d actually done the last two albums that we put out we did these acoustic EPs or alternative EPs and we did those with Ed and it was a lot of fun. We’d show up and we had no idea what we were gonna do and we’d just kind of make it up as we’d go along and we’d have a week to do that. So we thought we’d take that experience and make a full album and do it like that. Josh just had a baby girl last May and so he wanted to spend as much time at home as possible so those are kind of all the reasons why we did that, and we didn’t want to spend a ridiculous amount of money and get a ridiculous producer to do it. We thought we’d just try to handle things ourselves and see where it went. And it was basically, what this album is like, based on everything that I said you can probably see that it was just really exciting for us to have no plan and to just do whatever we wanted to do. We’ve always had a lot of freedom but this time we had ultimate freedom and we could just make it up as we went along and that’s what we did. I feel like these songs are even more so outside of the box that we may have been placed in. There’s a lot more experimental stuff, I feel like it might be a darker album. But it’s also funny too, a little bit funny, but mostly nostalgic. If I were to sum it all up, and this may sound cliché and weird, but it’s basically songs about love and death. Those are the main themes.

Speaking of doing things without a label, what do you think are the benefits and also the negatives of going DIY instead of going with a label?

Well, I should say that when we made this album we didn’t have a label. That’s not to say that we won’t sign to a label in the future because that’s something that we’re right in the middle of discussing right now. We’ve met with some labels and there’s some really cool labels out there, some people that we’ve known before and some new labels that are interested in putting out our album. But then we also have talked about what it would take to put it out ourselves and if we put it out ourselves we’d have to come up with the money up front and it’d be a lot of money, a lot of time and a lot of work to do all of that ourselves, and we’ve never done that before. So the big question for us is weighing are we gonna be able to do that or… because the other thing is we take on all of the risk of it as well. So if it’s a success, we’ll make a lot of money. If it’s a failure, we’ll lose a lot of money and it could end us. So with going with a label, you usually get a signing bonus or you get some money up front which will allow you to live and just focus on the music and focus on playing shows and not have to do all of the, probably all of the work that you guys are learning here in school, and then we take on none of the risk. Granted we don’t make as much money if it’s a success, but we also don’t lose as much if it’s a failure. So those are just kind of the things that we’re thinking out, but we’re super excited about this record and I really feel like if we can get the word out and people know there is an album and they listen to it, they’re gonna get really excited about this. That’s just sort of a gut feeling. I really feel like people are gonna latch on to some of these songs. But as far as that goes, the label can help you in taking on a lot of the risk and it also can enable you to, instead of having five people do everything, you might have 20-50 people working for you at any given moment, so there’s just a lot more terrain that you can cover in all aspects of your career.

Let’s talk a little bit about the curated series that Motion City Soundtrack is doing with MAD Dragon Records. How did that come about?

I don’t know how it initially came about. The rumor has it that Jesse, our keyboardist, contacted Terry Tompkins [Label Director at MAD Dragon Records] about his band, he manages a band called A Great Big Pile of Leaves and we toured with them and they’re amazing, super cool. He wanted to do a 7-inch series on his label, he started a label called Pressing Matters. Somehow in their talks the idea of Motion City getting involved as a band happened, and everybody seemed to like that idea more. We thought that we could maybe get it to a bigger audience that way, so that’s how that happened. It’s basically MAD Dragon Records, Drexel University and Motion City Soundtrack are all getting together and we created a label, basically just a name – The BoomBox Generation, which is something kind of, just going back to our roots, it’s one of our earliest songs. So we just thought, “Okay, this makes sense for us.” So what we’re doing is each of us, each band member is picking a band that we like and we’re producing 2-4 songs and we’re gonna put out 7-inches throughout 2012 and all of the songs are gonna be engineered by the students at Drexel University and once we, each band member is gonna produce an album of 3 songs and then students are gonna engineer it. Then once that’s done, students are gonna mix it, then they’re gonna master it, the albums are gonna be manufactured. The students are then in charge of getting the word out and doing the A&R of all that. Basically it’s a student-run experience from beginning to end. So it’s like everybody wins, everybody gets something out of it. These bands are all bands that were hoping to raise awareness to get to the next level of their career. And it’s also for us to showcase some different things that we’re into and if people like our band, they might at least check these bands out and they might be able to hear why we like them. So that’s kind of what that whole project is about.

A few fans wrote in and Angelia Jones wanted to know how your Final Cut skills are coming along.

I know her!

And she wanted to know if you have any new film projects in the works.

I do not have any new film projects in the works. My Final Cut skills are not going very well. I’ve been focusing on music as of late, and I actually am in the process of getting ProTools 11, but I’ve never used ProTools before so I’m gonna basically set up a room in my…. It’s a long story, but I have a condo and I used to share it with my sister and she moved out so now I have this extra room so now I’m gonna turn that extra room into a recording studio. Then I can just demo things for Motion City and whatever, much better than just singing them into my phone with an acoustic guitar on a voice memo.

But that works so well!

I know, and then I can never remember what I played. So, itreally works well. So, Final Cut skills not going so well. Movies, not so much. I’ve talked to a bunch of people, there’s a couple people that I’ve been talking to about possibly adapting projects but I really don’t want to talk about it because I always hate talking about things that don’t happen.

Everyone, and I mean everyone, wants to ask about your hair.

I know, I know!

I don’t know what it is, but there’s so many questions about it. Does your hair have anything that it wants to say to its fanclub?

That it wants to say? It wants to say, “Back off! Leave me alone, I’m just hair.” No, it’s funny because I feel like I’m noticing trends that are whenever, like the thing that people are most interested in about a person that’s kind of just a, well I won’t say non-important, but to me it’s strange. Because it’s just my hair. I think it’d be more awesome if they were interested in the music or the words or whatever but I understand that people are fixated on certain things. For me, what I’ve noticed is that it’s usually this thing that happens on accident that people are attracted to or that they want to know about, like, “What is this weird thing?” Like Jim Jarmusch, everybody used to be like, “Oh my god, I love your white hair! What’s that story about,” and it’s like, “Well, in my family our hair turns white at an early age.” There’s nothing big about it, it was just his thing. So for me, I’m just lazy. So I wash my hair, I put product in it, and then I go to bed and then I can wake up and just do this for about three seconds [running hands through hair] and I’m done. I don’t have to deal with it, so for me it’s just about not having to deal with it, and that’s why it sticks out.

Awesome. Okay, what is your favorite YouTube video?

YouTube video? I mean that could be anything, anything that’s on YouTube! That could be anything…

This is somehow the hardest question I ever ask anyone.

Well, here’s one from a while ago. I remember there was this, I don’t know if it was a TV show or what but there was this Japanese clip of basically a group of people would do something to an unsuspecting victim. So there’s one guy walking down the street and there was nobody on that street and then suddenly you see behind him, just this horde of people slowly creeping up and suddenly they start walking around him and behind him. Suddenly he’s surrounded by people, he doesn’t think anything of it and then at one moment they all lie down on the ground. So he stops and looks up and is all freaked out. Then there’s another clip of the same thing where all the people are walking up behind him and they’re a little bit louder so he kind of turns and looks and as soon as he looks the guy in front goes, “That’s him!” Then they all start running after him, and he freaks out and starts running. It’s like this weird, I don’t know what it’s called but it’s a clip of people just messing with one person in Japan. I don’t know, it’s really funny.

If you could tell anyone reading this interview just one thing, what would you say?

One thing to tell people… I would say, I don’t know. As I get older, and I’m not old. I mean sometimes I think, “Oh wow, I’m ancient,” and sometimes I think “Wait, I’m so young,” because I’ve got so much time ahead of me. But I’ve found that as I get older, the things that are important to me are very simple. I think being a good person, being kind to one another, those are the things that I care about. I’m a big fan of Ghandi and I’m a big fan of the Dalai Lama. One of my favorite quotes from Gandhi is “You must be the change you want to see in the world,” and I really dig that. I do believe that if we can treat each other with respect and if we can treat each other as equals then we can get to a better place as a human race. I feel like there’s so much anger and animosity and greed in the world and it’s a super bum out. I don’t want people to… I’m not asking people to do anything. I’m just hoping to do it myself and if somebody sees that, they might go, “Oh, you know, I dig that. I might do that too!” So, yeah, I just try to be good and it’s hard sometimes, because you watch these, speaking of YouTube, you watch these videos of police pepper-spraying protestors that aren’t doing anything and I get so angry and filled with rage. I wish that I didn’t get that angry, because I feel like if that were me in the situation I would’ve started swinging at the police and that would’ve ended badly. Because I do not want to be a violent person but I feel like I have a lot of work to do before I can attain that which the likes of the Dalai Lama and Gandhi were able to do, but that’s my goal. I just want to be a good human, yeah, that’s it.

What’s next in store for you guys? We talked a little bit about the curated series and the upcoming album – is there anything else?

Yeah, we don’t really have anything going on. It’s just we’re really trying to focus on finishing up this album, we’re in the middle of getting mixes back. Then we have to figure out if we’re signing to a label or not and then we have to find out when we’re gonna get the album out.

Will you guys tour once you have the album out?

Oh yeah, we’re planning a tour. The record is going to come out, whether we put it out ourselves or whether we’re putting it out with a label, we’ve got a date set in stone. I mean, not a specific date but late Spring, early Summer 2012 – that’s when we want the record out. We’re most likely going to go on a tour before that to kind of set it up, just a small tour and then most likely once the record’s out we’re gonna go on a bigger tour. We’ve sort of been away from, we haven’t really toured a lot in the last two years so I think in 2012 we’re gonna hit it hard.

For more information or to book an interview, contact Haley Holmes.

Haley@MadDragonMusic.com

@CallMeHaley