Darin’s Got the Soul,
I Got the Motor
I’ve been doing Soulmotor since the day Tesla first broke up in 1995; it’s never stopped. It’s just that Darin has got his movies, and I’ve got Tesla, so we work in between our busy schedules.
I found myself in conflict between Soulmotor and Tesla when writing songs. There’s one song called “Scene of the Crime” that I presented to Tesla. They didn’t want to do it. It didn’t suit Jeff. I wrote it thinking it could be a Tesla song, even though most stuff I write for Soulmotor I would never consider presenting to them, knowing how Darin approaches songs. Darin and Jeff are polar opposites—equally as great though, both great fuckin’ singers with their very own styles. I’m fortunate to work with two singers that I really just fuckin’ love. I presented “Scene of the Crime” to Tesla and Tom liked it, and the band liked it. Jeff thought it reminded him too much of “Let Me Roll It” by Paul McCartney, so he never gravitated towards it, and I gave it to Darin. He took to it like a fish in the water. It sounds more like a Darin song; it has this Perry Mason kind of theme to it, but I thought it would have worked as a Tesla song. On Simplicity I wrote “Life Is a River,” which was totally for Jeff, a “Maybe I’m Amazed” kind of thing or “Let it Be,” which I think is the most beautiful song ever written.
Lyrically, Tesla’s darkest song is probably “Heaven’s Trail,” but even that’s kind of uplifting. Jeff will tell you he’s not religious, doesn’t believe in God, but he’ll write a lyric like there’s no way out of this living hell unless you walk heaven’s trail. I get it, even though I think it’s a little bit dark, I get it as a positive because it’s like saying we’re fucked, but there is a way out of this. I’ve never really analyzed our songs that much. Jeff is almost constantly writing lyrics that look at the very best side of things. He writes hopeful songs to give people hope. He’s an optimist. Over the course of time, I think that’s the stuff that sticks around. People don’t want to be on a bummer. None of us want to be a fuckin’ bummer.
After wrapping the album, I went out on tour, and Darin made his latest movie, Badass Monster Killer. Planet of the Vampire Women was his first movie, and that was when we did the Soulmotor album Wrong Place at the Right Time. He was making that, and we started writing this new album while he was writing and filming that. He was busy, and I would go away on Tesla tours, and I’d write some stuff and feed it to him, so this is an accumulation of two and a half years of work that he and I were doing, and now I’m finally able to finish it. It’s been sitting around for probably six, seven months, but I haven’t had the time to mix. He’s been busy with another film. We talked about putting this out in the near future and doing six weeks of dates behind it through the Midwest and somewhere down in Texas.
The mixes I’ve been doing are a lot more focused, not what was typical of Soulmotor in the past. As I said before, I started this album with just me and Darin; there was no guitar player. After Wrong Place at the Right Time, Mike Mathis and Dave Watts recorded some tracks, we did a few shows, and that didn’t really work out with them playing live. I got this guy, Tom Armstrong-Leavitt, to play, and we got Dave Buckner, the drummer from Papa Roach, to play with us for a couple of shows. Then we got this guy, Kelly Smith, to come in because Buckner didn’t work out. He’s a nice guy and a great drummer, but he had a young son, so he didn’t have the time. I put together a Soulmotor touring band with Tom Armstrong-Leavitt and Kelly Smith and started doing dates to support Wrong Place at the Right Time.
The new guys wanted to get in and write some new music, and I tried, but it’s just that Darin and I work really well together. Tom Armstrong-Leavitt wanted to write, but it didn’t work. He’s a great player, and I like him a lot, but it was like, “I can’t write songs with you.” He was always the main guy in his Sacramento bands, Wynch and Hurt, but Soulmotor is me and Darin. We wrote songs with Tommy McClendon, and he was part of that sound, but Tommy was gone. That was magic; the three of us could work together.
Darin doesn’t write music, just lyrics and melodies. When he starts and I give him a piece of music, he’ll just go la, la, la, blah, blah, blah, la la la la. He won’t even sing lyrics. I call it Darin language—“baaheewahey”—he just sings this melody, then we have that song, and it’s like, “OK, cool, let’s have some lyrics here that mean something.” Then he comes back with his little mini-movies. Every song’s a little mini-movie. It’s always a story. That’s his thing. He’s not going to write a love song: “Baby I love you, Baby I’m a need you.” With the internet and all, maybe he should have a mini-doc song.
Tom Armstrong-Leavitt didn’t pan out, so then I got disenchanted with that, and I said to Darin, “Look, this is just hard work. I’m just going to go into my studio with my drum program, see what I come up with, then I’ll start writing this stuff.” He immediately gravitated to it, and we started doing it, so maybe it’s a bit more commercial because it’s just me writing the music. I have a commercial sensibility, and I didn’t have to deal with a guitar player, because I never like the, “Well, what about my solo?” vibe. For me it’s the song, it’s the melody, it’s the vocal. It’s not about the guitar part, it’s always been about the song. I’ve always known that, but I never had been in total control because I’m with the team. So on this record I’m a little like George Martin. It was definitely, “I’m going to write these songs. It’s going to be about Darin’s vocals, and the story and the music as support.”
When I had killer guitar players, they wanted to be all fuckin’ killer. One of the things Tommy McClendon said when he left Soulmotor was that he was leaving because he couldn’t “shred.” I was like, “OK, well, shred on, brother.” He and I were cool, I love him, he’s one of my oldest, dearest friends. There was a time after he left Soulmotor where we didn’t talk, but today we are tight as we used to be, and I think we’ll even work together again someday.
I play guitar kind of like a caveman, but good enough to write songs, so I just started doing demos. If you can play block chords, you can write songs. Kurt Cobain proved that to some degree, right? So that’s what I started doing. Then I got Dave Rude on the record and I said, “Look, I’m playing this, this is my idea, now let’s make it better.” Some things he played like I played ’em, some things he played a little bit different, but it was all written by me. I enjoyed the process.
The first thing I brought Dave in on was this song called “Dream Reanimation Machine,” and he immediately wrote the middle eight. He’s like, “I got this idea for a bridge,” and I said, “That’s perfect,” because Dave has real good song sensibilities; he’s not just thinking about shredding all the time.
In general, some of the tracks are just me on guitar with Frank playing some solos. Some of the tracks are just Dave on guitar, cleaning up my original tracks. With riff-based songs like these, you get lots more flexibility as to who does what. Fuck it, I’ve been doing this a long time, I know what Soulmotor is. It’s not going to happen with Tesla. Tesla’s a big committee, and it’s always going to be a big committee. With Soulmotor, we can be more loose, flexible, and spontaneous.