This is video of accepting the 2009 Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts on Feb. 17, 2010, and performing the song “Good Soldier.” Video by John Moore, The Denver Post.
Denver hip-hop outfit are ready to take over the airwaves. Again.
Talk about a big week. Flobots play their CD release show tonight at the . (Tickets are still available .) They release their latest record, “Survival Story,” on Tuesday — and they’re marking that day with an on East Colfax.
We sat down with Jamie Laurie — a.k.a. Jonny 5, one of the group’s MCs — over chai at the Shoppe to chat about his group’s survival story, including their current single “White Flag Warriors,” which has been owning KTCL for the last month.
This is the first installment of that interview. Keep an eye on for more next week.
Question: Have you been itching to perform these new songs?
Answer: At some point in last record, Jesse took me aside and said, ‘We’re about to play for a bigger audience than ever. I know you wanna play new songs.’ He had to break it to me that we weren’t going to be able to do any new ideas for a while. When it came time to do this, I was psyched. And this is our day job. This is phase two of making it big. The first phase is touring. You’re performing, and that’s your job, and you pinch yourself. Phase two is getting up to write songs, and then you go to bed.
Q: Were you all nervous about writing the sophomore record?
A: There was some apprehension or fear from some people, but artistically it was exciting to have a new canvas to work on. And to have all these people who want you to make new music. Creative people grow up, and you have what you’re supposed to be doing – homework, job and everything else. Creative stuff fits in the side. You do it in the margins, and write this rap and share it when you can. Now everything is switched. The thing we’re supposed to be doing is writing songs.
Q: From your perspective, who are these people who want new music from you?
A: It’s the label, our manager, ourselves, the community, our fans – everybody who is expecting us to write a new album.
Q: Let’s go back to the beginning of this process. When was that?
A: January 2009. There were ideas we kicked around on the road before that, but from January to May we were writing songs – and for a month there, were on tour with Rise Against in the U.K. In March, April and May we wrote the songs. A little bit in June. By July, we were in the studio. Then it was three weeks at the Blasting Room. We recorded in 20 days, averaging about a song a day with little leeway.
Q: With Mario C.
A: Yeah, with Mario C., but more on him later. We had a bunch of other songs on the backburner. We revisited those in August and October, and from there it was mixing and edits and conversations about the songs.
Q: Let’s talk about “White Flag Warrior,” the single that has already been all over KTCL for the last month.
A: “White Flag Warrior” was one of the songs that was on the backburner. Originally it was a snippet of a Leonard Cohen song that was gonna be the chorus, and we weren’t able to hear back from them if we could do a derivative work. It wasn’t a cover. We were altering his words and rearranging them. We weren’t getting any response, and we didn’t really feel we could sell the chorus, as it required this guttural scream.
That was when we asked Tim from Rise Against, and he said he’d be into it. We didn’t want to get he and his label involved unless we knew it would move forward, and Tim said, “I’ll come out anyway, and I’ll do one version with the original version,” and he came out and did it, and that’s what you hear. We didn’t like the old one anyway. We liked the new one, which was “White Flag Warror.”
Q: Is that your term, “White Flag Warrior?”
A: Tim wrote that. That’s his term, ‘white flag warrior.’ We’d already asked him to come down. The Cohen song we were trying was “Story of Isaac:” “You who build the altars now/The Sacrifice these children/You must not do it anymore/A scheme is not a vision/And you never have been tempted/By a demon or a god ” It was a anti-militarism song, and in the midst of doing it, Tim emailed me, “Hey, we just had this controversy with this radio station in Florida. We found out we were playing this U.S. Army recruitment show, we’ve done all this anti-recruitment work. And so it was either change the sponsor or pull out of the show.”
I guess the radio station program director spent an hour on the radio saying “Rise Against hates the troops,” and there was all this controversy. He asked us to write some words of support for the band. We did. When he came to Denver, we were thinking about peacemaking and recruitment. I hadn’t spent much time with Tim, and so I talked with him some about his father’s military background. And this line came out of it: “We’d rather make our children martyrs or murderers.” (It’s the chorus to “White Flag Warriors.”) He went into the studio and nailed it on the first time. He came out to a text from his wife, and she said, “There should be something else.” We thought a bout peaceful warriors white flag warriors He was thinking about a quote from Bono, “We have to drain the colors from the flags until they’re white.”
But then we had to think about the white flag’s alternate meaning: Did we want to be confused with “surrender warrior?” But before it meant surrender, it meant, “We want to negotiate. We come unarmed. We want to communicate. You cannot do us harm.” At this point, it was just Tim and myself. And Stephan sent me a long text message that said, “The more I think about the white flag warrior, the more I love it. The more you use a flag, the more faded it becomes.”
Q: Did you know the song was singleworthy?
A: We knew the song was good, and we knew that having Tim on it would get us some attention. Their label and his manager was on it. Once it was laid down, everybody heard it and we were like, “Hmm.” The song changed everything. Then came the discussion: “Do we want our first song to be one with a guest. What is the message that sends?” Then we decided that the song was good, and it made sense to lead off with it.
Q: What’s the biggest change from last time to this time?
A: Last time we were chasing “Handlebars” and containing the energy that was there on its own. This time, it’s methodical and more like the normal process for everybody else.
More next week, before the Flobots in-store at Twist & Shout on Tuesday.
Read more about the Flobots’ Mayor’s Award
Read about the Flobots Mayors Award (including more video), and the other winners .
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Ricardo Baca is the founder and co-editor of and an award-winning critic and journalist at . He is also the executive director of the , Colorado’s premier indie music festival. Follow his whimsies at , his live music habit at and his iTunes addictions at .
