MUSIC INTERVIEW: INNERPARTYSYSTEM

Jared Piccone and Patrick Nissley Pick Up Speed on Their Second Lap of the Music Industry

By: Team Buzzine

July 29, 2011

Innerpartysystem was born in 2006 like a phoenix rising from the ashes of Reading, Pennsylvania emo band Thirteen Over Eight. Unfortunately, that phoenix was not quite ready to spread its wings when the digital spotlight so quickly found them, and IPS went from being a bedroom side-project to a major label priority with such dizzying speed that what followed became a blur of world-class producers (Alan Moulder, Stuart Price) and world-spanning tours (Nine Inch Nails, Linkin Park), followed by the departure of a band member, the ending of the major label deal, and long months of silence punctuated only by an occasional remix (The Killers, Katy Perry). However, here in 2011, Innerpartysystem has been reborn again with a new release, a new record label, and a hard-won new musical outlook. Patrick Nissley and Jared Piccone from the band sat down with Buzzine’s Stefan Goldby in Austin, Texas to talk about their new music and why they are addicted to big thumps, musical gadgets, and love.

Stefan Goldby: After initially being signed to a major label for your debut album, you are now on your second circuit of the music industry – what did you learn from that initial experience?

Jared Piccone: When some bands get signed, it can take years for the record to come out… until they’re ready and they’re great live, and I feel like just now our band is to the point where we should be public about it, and the last three or four years have just been a big development for us, because we didn’t really have a chance –nobody does anymore. You play a show, all of a sudden you have a really big song on Beatport or Soundcloud or something, and then you have no time to figure out what the hell you’re doing. [Laughs]

Patrick Nissley: I lived near Jerry – we’ve always been buddies, and I put a couple songs on MySpace, and we put a contact up, and he started getting calls from labels. I’d never even made an album before. I just made music all the time, and I’d done production for other things before, but it all happened so fast, and it was just inexperience. I don’t know what the hell was going on. But now the time has passed, we’ve learned a lot more, and we’re just more knowledgeable.

JP: It’s a lot more fun this way too, less stressful.

PN: Absolutely.

SG: You signed to Red Bull’s record label this second time around – which is very much NOT a traditional company… what was it about their offer that made you willing to jump back into the game?

PN: My biggest thing about being signed to Red Bull and the draw to that was they seemed to be more focused on the creative side of things, and more interested in what we as people want to do, and not like there’s seven miles of red tape you have to cut through. With Island, it was like when you send a song in, everybody’s got an opinion, and then everybody sends back their opinion, and then it gets all mixed up, but with Red Bull, it just doesn’t seem like that was the vibe. When we go to meet with them, we know everybody at the label. There’s not this mystical figurehead that nobody ever meets and he’s too good for everybody. So that’s a big selling point for me – being able to be interactive with the people you’re actually working with, and there’s not this weird wall of 19 A&R people giving their opinion about the same song.

JP: It’s run like an indie label: It’s like a small family. You go in there and there are like six people that work there and it just makes a lot more sense, honestly. It makes so much more sense. Going through what we went through first on a major, and then going through this, it’s like, why do they even do that like that? Why is there 100 people here, all butting heads and stuff, and nothing ever really gets done? It’s been a much more positive experience this time.

SG: The other thing is Red Bull is not just helping you make the album. They have events around the world as well, some of which you get to plug into...

PN: They do cool s***.

JP: I remember right about the time when we heard they were interested was when they did that thing with Shaun White where they built him that half-pipe in the middle of nowhere. You can only get to it by helicopter. Clearly there’s no way to make any money off that. They’re not doing it for profit; they’re just doing it because it rules. And to be a part of something that does stuff just because it’s cool and seems like it would be enjoyable and pleasurable for everybody else to see, that’s what we’re about.

SG: When it came to actually recording your new EP – Was there a single best day or moment in the studio?

PN: A lot of the songs on the EP have been culminated over years, after our end-of-Island stint, into our off-time, and it’s been sitting, and we just wanted to put them out. So literally, some of those songs have been on the burner for a year and a half.

JP: One day for me that stood out was when we were recording at the Red Bull studios in Los Angeles. 50 Cent showed up. I didn’t get to meet him, but I could see his silhouette in the back of the car, so that was really exciting. [Laughs]

PN: [Laughs] That was pretty cool. The day we almost met 50 Cent was the best time of our recording the new EP. Print. [Laughs]

SG: What are you proudest of about this EP?

PN: I’m proud because I can see a progression and we’re not sticking to the same style. I can tell it’s more progressive and where the next album is gonna go, it’s a good lead-in, and it’s a good time capsule between Island and Red Bull because it’s all the songs that happened in between them. I really like it.

JP: I really like that there’s a couple of songs on the record that are different than what people are gonna expect. I feel like the next album is gonna be more like that, especially now with Electro getting so big. It’s really easy just to make everything a banger – just like four on the floor. As easy as it can be to fall into that and probably be more successful, we’re just trying to still hold to our guns and do the style of music we’re trying to do.

SG: So this EP is basically the stepping-stone to the new album?

PN: Right.

SG: American Trash is pretty nihilistic, in a lot of ways, and the video even more so. Great video, for starters: Who doesn’t love an intellectual excuse to look at pretty girls. [Laughs]

PN: [Laughs] Yeah, the video is really cool, man. That’s kind of our thought behind it too: we just need to have really good-looking women in the video, because you can never go wrong with that.

SG: It felt like perhaps you’d had a night out, made it home and found one of those rare occasions where a music television channel is actually playing a music video, saw “Addicted to Love” and went…

JP: That was actually a reference for that video.

PN: That was one of the references.

JP: The part where the girls are clearly not playing, like in “Addicted to Love” where they’re just strumming and moving their hands. [Laughs] That stuff’s fun.

SG: Was it an idea you guys had? How did the video come about?

JP: That video was directed by [Stephen] Penta… any other official video we’ve done was done by him, and a lot of the online stuff we’ve ever done was done by him. He’s gotten a lot more busy, so we’re both doing a little bit different stuff now, but up until the last couple months, he’s been almost like another member of the band, as far as visually. We all sat together and came up with that. He’s always been a part of us…you know what I mean? And that’s why we’ve always used him, because he isn’t just like, “Hey, I have an idea. Are you into it or not?” He’ll be more like, “What do you guys want out of this video?”

Kris [Barman] sat down, and he pitched us something on the captions, and once we started running all those together, that really set the beginning…that actually came after the video was shot, and we sat down and dreamed that up, and I feel like that really tied it together and made it like, “Yeah!”

PN: Really tied the room together.

JP: Like a nice throw rug.

SG: You guys are both self-professed gear addicts, and you’ve obviously had a chance to accumulate more musical toys over the last couple of years: Does that make it more difficult to know when a song is done? Is it like, “But we haven’t used the machine that goes ‘ping’ yet!”

PN: Man, you just hit the nail right on the head with that, because I love gear and I love sounds – I love weird sounds and stuff. I’m also the guy that will sit for five hours and listen to kickdrums and go through them…so picky for no reason. It’s so detrimental to time, effort… But that’s just how it is.

JP: There are 20 versions of every song before they get to the final version.

PN: It makes for creative working titles, for sure. But that’s one of the things we all like – cool gear and cool sounds, cool distortion units… all that. It does help, but sometimes it’s like the exact thing you’re looking for so it’s totally worth it.

JP: It all comes together for sure. I just had a conversation with somebody yesterday about the program Ableton Live…actually it was Penta. I was talking to him because he just started using it to make music, and he was like, “Every time I’ve ever gotten mad at Patrick for redoing a song, redoing a song, I finally understand because programming now on a computer is so vast and deep, and there’s so much you can do, that it can never end. You can work on a song for years. It’s almost to the point where you have to set an egg timer or something.

PN: I could probably work on a song for the rest of my life and not be happy with it.

JP: Sometimes you’ve just got to be like, “All right, I’m done. That’s it.”

PN: But that’s also part of the learning experience and growing up into being a musician, which is you have to learn to say, “This is finished. I love this. This is the best I can do,” which is, honestly, one of the hardest things for me to even get over, because it just gets looped in your brain, you’ve heard it so many times, you don’t even know what you’re listening to anymore. You’re like, “Is this even a song? Does this suck? This sucks.”

JP: Questioning! Something that you loved at 6:00 p.m. – you can question whether it’s the worst thing you’ve ever made by midnight - because you’re just literally looping four bars for hours on end.

SG: When you take the studio track, which you’ve wrestled to at least a tie in being finished, and now you start thinking about playing it live, perhaps with Ableton… Where does that leave you? If you’re already wrestling with ‘when is it done?’ you do have a chance to tinker with it every time you play live. Is playing live for Innerpartysystem at this point like DJing - like reading a crowd? Or are you more trying to reproduce the studio sound for an audience?

PN: Usually live, what we do is we take the core stems of the track – because we’ve run backing tracks with Ableton – which we can edit. We have a controller that my brother, our sound guy Andy, built, and we have ways to edit all the tracks and use beat repeats…and launch samples and clips we can throw in, and it’s almost like you can play it differently every time. It’s still the same core of the idea of the song, but I just play live synth over everything, because I just love playing synthesizers. So I could be playing some wacky, crazy sound one day, and the next day I could be playing the rudimentary thing that should be there. It’s kind of just like a free-form way of playing the song. And we can take other ideas that we didn’t use for the song and put that in the track too, and just extend parts…

JP: …to make it a little different than it is on the record, live.

PN: Right. Just make it a different experience for the song live than it is on the record, instead of just putting it in, playing it, put your hands over the big parts – that kind of thing. It’s much more enjoyable, I feel, when we’re all playing…

JP: We get a good grasp on that. We have a really large PA for how small our practice room is, and I think knowing how it’s gonna come off live is a really important part of our process – once we make something, we take it downstairs and blast it. And sometimes you’ll figure out that there’s way too many sounds on the track, and that means it needs to be way simpler because all it needs is a kick in the baseline right here… I think that’s always a really big part for us, before we even play it out, is going downstairs and listening to it super loud. How it’s gonna sound in a club is a really big part. As far as reading crowds, we don’t really set it up as far as a DJ set per se. We have a club set where we can do that, but as far as our live show goes, it’s much more about endlessly making the sounds thump harder. [Laughs]

PN: We try to make it 25% heavier than it is on the record, live. Because that energy is just there personally, so you want it to come across that much more intense. It seems to be working out, alright?

SG: So far. [Laughs] What are the signs that it’s a great night on stage, not just a good one, between the three of you?

JP: Between the three of us? I think everybody has their characteristic things that they’ll do where you can tell they’re feeling it. Like, Pat gets some of these little James Brown moves -- I don’t think he realizes he does -- like throwing the mic out a little bit. I think that’s just dancing. I think it’s just feeling it and having a good time, and I definitely, instead of breaking one stick, I’ll break five. You can tell the shows are good because there’s kindling everywhere. I’ve got my hands over my head the whole time, playing as hard as I can like a monkey – not really like a drum-player. And every once in a while, it’s funny - if we play really big shows, we always have these connection faces where we’ll look back and be like, “Is this really this cool?!”

PN: “This is crazy!” 

JP: “This is really awesome!” Like little kids still, which is such a great feeling, that after all this time, we can still have that turnaround in the ‘holy s***’ moment. Like, “5,000, really? This many people know this song right now? I can’t take it.” So that’s honestly the biggest payoff still. 

SG: What’s been the best moment of the Innerpartysystem experience so far?

PN: Almost meeting 50 Cent. [Laughs]

JP: There’s definitely been a handful. I can go back through, like Milton Keynes with Linkin Park was definitely ridiculous, just because of purely the amount of people that were there. I think the best time I’ve ever had at a show was when we played in Denver with 3OH!3 in the fall, and that was the most people I’ve ever seen. It’s one thing to play a show and there are a lot of people there, and you’re an opener and they’re just stoked because they can’t wait to see the headliner, but it’s another thing…there were probably between 5,000-7,000 people all screaming the words to the song “American Trash,” and you can even watch on YouTube that when we’re all done we were like, “Oh my god, is this really happening?” This meant people really cared about our band. You don’t know because you’re not there for it – we don’t live there. It was just cool when you come in for one or two days every couple months and it’s like, “Oh my gosh, this is working.” That was definitely that show for me.

PN: That was crazy.

JP: That was the night before Thanksgiving or the day after Thanksgiving maybe, this past year. That was definitely the most memorable show I’ve ever played.

PN: That was nuts.

SG: What do you want somebody who sees you play for the first time to walk away thinking?

PN: That we’re not a s***ty band. [Laughs] Keep expectations low… I don’t know; hopefully they think we’re good and that they have a good time and tell their friends.

SG: Let me ask that question a different way. If you have learned a lot about what you are as a band and who you are individually as musicians, what is that? What is the core of Innerpartysystem?

JP: I think one thing we try to portray to people through our music is getting past genres a little bit. I know a lot of bands will be like, “Oh, we don’t like to categorize ourselves,” and I feel like it’s probably a cliché thing to say at this point, but we just really, since the inception of this band, have just concentrated just on making music, regardless of where it’s gonna sit in the genre spectrum. And the one great thing for us has been, since they’ve always been so hard to pinpoint, we’ve toured with a lot of different kinds of bands, from electronic bands to Christian metal bands. Literally all over the spectrum.

We’ve done Warped Tour, we do electronic music festivals… It’s really across the spectrum. I love when I see a kid come over to me with a Bring Me the Horizon shirt on, or some super heavy band, and be like, “Yo, your band was awesome. I’ve never listened to dance music before.” I think that’s one big payoff for us that we always try to push on people. It’s okay to like a great song, regardless of what it is. And I feel like the days of being a metalhead or being into hip hop – those are getting very blurred because all music is so easy to come by now, so that I think we’d really like to push the vibe of ‘just like good stuff.’ You don’t have to like a certain kind of music.

PN: You make a really good salesman.

JP: I was a used car salesman before this band, and I SUCKED. I was the worst. If this band didn’t happen, I’d be totally screwed, because I didn’t have anything going for me as a used car salesman at all.

Innerpartysystem’s ‘Never Be Content’ EP is out now on Red Bull Records.