From the years 2000 to 2002 I ran an online zine, Actionattackhelicopter, along with my friends, Brian and Josh. I was fortunate to interview many musicians whose work I enjoyed. I’m posting some of those interviews here for anyone who may have missed them the first time. They have been edited for length, relevance, and to correct for my poor editing skills at the time of original publication. Keep in mind that these were done over ten years ago, thus individuals’ opinions, thoughts, and ideas may no longer be relevant, but they are still interesting as a snapshot of a particular time and place.
This interview was originally published in autumn 2000.
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False Cathedrals is the name of the album. The album you must have. The album that is giving me the soundtrack to my summer. The album that will most likely be in my top three albums released all year. I must admit that the interviews I enjoy best are with the bands that I’m into the most at the time. Therefore, the next obvious step was to talk to Elliott about this masterpiece and see how it all came together. I called up lead singer and guitarist Chris Higdon and chatted about this remarkable piece of work.
I’ve gotta compliment you because I really like the new album.
Oh, thank you.
I don’t know how to describe it. It’s really big sounding. The only comparison that I could draw on it, not musically, but on the scope of it was the Cure. It reminds me of the Cure as far as when the Cure would do an album you could always sense it was a big undertaking and there were these epic songs behind it. Are you influenced by the Cure at all?
They’re definitely an amazing band and I know Jay [Palumbo, guitarist] is a huge fan and I own an album somewhere in my collection as does Kevin [Ratterman, drummer]. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying to figure out what I’ve been doing for the past year and it seems as though 1999 just kind of disappeared. And I’m thinking, “Where was I during this time?” And it’s like, “Oh. I was doing this record.” We poured everything we had into it and some things got neglected and some things didn’t, but it was definitely an intense concentration. We wanted it to be that way because the first album (U.S. Songs) was just sporadic songs over a two-year period. This was more of an undertaking and putting them all together and taking the songs that we wanted to do and relate together and translate. It feels like our first real album to us.
I can definitely see that. It seems like U.S. Songs was just a bunch of songs but this seems more put together. Not that it’s a concept album by any means but it all flows really well together.
Definitely. And it has to do with everyone working really well together. It was the first album that Kevin, our drummer, had a lot of input on, which really helped things. I’m fairly proud of it. There are things you can look back on and say, “I wish we would’ve done this or this,” but as a whole I’m pretty happy with it.
I was just going to mention that I wondered about Kevin, because it seems like the percussion is really up front and it’s mixed higher (not in a bad way) than on a lot of rock albums. I was wondering if there was a reason for that. And also the orchestration—I can’t imagine this album being done without the strings and the keyboards.
Definitely. You always want to strip down and hopefully we could take these songs if we had to and strip them down to a couple of acoustic guitars but I don’t know. It’s not as guitar driven, even though there are guitars all over it. We wanted to take the focus off of that and even now we’re trying to do a little bit more where they’re there and you feel them but it’s not as bombastic of a thing to be hit in the face with. It just makes it that much better because then when you want to you can bring those up to the front. I think the heavy low-end and the sampling and the drums are something we’ve wanted to bring forth, as well as the vocals, and have those shape the song.
Oh yeah. Between the vocals and the percussion, those two things really stick out. It totally makes the album. Did Kevin have a bigger hand in this? It’s not like he was the producer or anything, but how did he add to the album?
Right. We had a producer named Tobias Miller and he was a great guy, but Kevin was definitely a right hand man on engineering. Kevin had a lot to do with a lot of the skeleton work of the actual writing of the song to begin with. I wouldn’t want to put a percentage on it, but a vast majority were ideas that came from him. Songs that drummers write, to me, work so much better. A song comes down to drum beats and bass and then everything else is secondary and adds itself on. The vocals and lyrics and content are definitely important but guitar wise you can put whatever you want on top of that and it just makes the song.
Talk to me a little bit about the lyrical content of the album. What was driving you to write some of these songs?
I guess it was just my mindset at the time. It’s not a concept album, but things just naturally fell into place from starting to play with pictures of what the actual songs were going to be about to when the artwork came to be. When we found out the name of the painting—which is actually called “False Cathedrals”—it all snowballed. There are some underlying tones of leading yourself and misleading yourself through life and having false expectations and false idols within your daily structure of living.
A lot of seems to focus on relationships.
Yeah. Definitely. Love relationships and friendships. Your relationship with yourself and your inner battles, too. There’s definitely some inner turmoil but there’s also some stuff on there that’s kind of free. I tried to be a little more direct this time in the writing so people could relate to or at least get a little better grasp than on U.S. Songs. I felt like on that album people were like, “I don’t really know what you’re talking about,” which is fine because then they end up making their own interpretation and relate in their own way. It was a concentrated effort to make things a little more direct and not be as vague. I think with words and coloring of sentences you can make something sound really cool but you might not have any idea what it means. With these songs and this album I have a little better grasp of what they mean to me.
Was their specifically one romantic relationship that lead to this or was this just your impressions of romantic relationships in general?
Definitely my current undertaking is a part of it. It’s a big part of my life and I think it will continue to be regardless of how anything turns out. You take each thing as it comes. It’s everything. It’s exactly how I’m feeling right now and probably will continue to be. Something like “Drive On to Me” which is like the introduction to the relationship and that first meeting is like, “Oh my God! I met someone and I don’t know what to do,” to songs like “Shallow Like Your Breath,” which is like the chaos of love and relationships. So it spins through inner things, but then there’s also songs like “Calm Americans” which is more like a social thought of a song. It’s ways that I’ve seen myself act and what I’m into and why I’m into it. It’s like, “What are you doing?”
“Calm Americans” just seems like a song that Fugazi would write.
Oh yeah?
Yeah. Just like the social context of “America is just a word I use” type of thing. And just how it talks about how we have those common man love affairs. I never really thought about it much before, but it was good because that song showed me how we all share these common love affairs with things, even though we’ve never met. And it’s all just because we’re Americans.
Exactly. Even things that we might not particularly like about ourselves, but we’re ingrained with this and we are consumers to a degree and we love to buy and be bigger and better. I don’t know why we say America because it’s North America, South America. It doesn’t mean the USA. It’s probably just me and how I end up dealing with myself. Being vain and being a consumer and fighting yourself not to be sexist or racist. There’s always going to be a part of yourself that can’t give up something and you’re not always going to be right, you just have to be yourself.
The other thing I noticed in the lyrics that wasn’t as major of a thing as relationships was the allusions to religion and Christianity. I was wondering what effect that has on your songwriting and what effect that has on your life.
It’s definitely something that haunts me. It’s always underneath me. The imagery of it is very easy for me to conjure up. People somehow have some type—whether it’s religious or not—they have some type of spirituality. I relate somehow to that. Not that I subscribe to any particular religion, but I was raised Catholic so these images are interwoven in my being somehow. I’m able to paint a little more graphic description with them. They’re definitely in there. There’s that and then there’s the title, False Cathedrals, which is in no way derogatory towards any type of religion. It’s just about how we’ve created all kinds of false ideals and false idols. The actual painting looks very cathedral-like but it’s actually an arena in Chicago. It’s from when they were tearing it down. At the same time they were calling Michael Jordan’s comeback to basketball “The Second Coming,” which is somewhat sacrilegious I would say. It all tied together like that. When we asked the artist if we could use his painting, he didn’t want it to come across as though it were saying “False Cathedrals” means false religions or religion is a bad word or a terrible thing. It relates completely opposite to that. If we strive more to some type of spiritual connection within ourselves it would be a lot better than trying to find peace through buying a new car.
I was also wondering about the meaning behind “Calvary Song.”
I was intrigued by the definition of Calvary, which besides being the hill where Jesus Christ was crucified on, it’s a word meaning “extreme suffering.” It’s more towards the definition of extreme suffering and learning how to deal with depression and anxiety and daily life. It’s a hope song, a way to help people and help your friends.
That’s cool. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this before but if you get someone to talk about military stuff, most people call it Calvary, too, instead of cavalry.
Exactly. It’s one of those words. I had to keep checking myself. Am I saying the right word? Am I singing the right word? Am I writing the right word down? I kept screwing up.
Do you have anything else you want to add before we wrap this up?
No. Thank you and I hope people enjoy what we’re doing. Check out the new set and the new record.
