Motion City Soundtrack

Emo Grows Up and Sobers Up

originally published September 10, 2008

Motion City Soundtrack frontman Justin Pierre may not be able to say yet if the band’s latest record, Even If It Kills Me, is the group’s best effort to date.

It may be too early to say if his singing is better than on the group’s other two albums or if his lyrics are the best he’s written. But he can say Even If It Kills Me captures bandmembers who have learned how to be unselfish writers and players and how to play to the strengths of the songs.

“I think in the earlier years, there was a bit of an ego battle, and now we’ve kind of gotten over that,” Pierre says. “I think that’s one thing that we’ve learned over the years - that based on a song, you can kind of dissect it. There’s the album, which is on one level, and then beneath that there is each song and finding each part for each song, and then each part for each verse, chorus or bridge or whatever. You can go down the line, and it’s like sometimes people don’t need to play (at certain points). Just as important as putting something in is taking something out."

“More and more, I think we’re finding that it’s about the songs and not necessarily the individuals,” he says. The other thing Pierre can say is that the making of Even If It Kills Me was different in several other important ways.

For one thing, the sheer productivity of the band represented a new twist for Motion City Soundtrack. “It was really weird because we had kind of a slew of songs to choose from, which is unheard of,” Pierre says. “We’re usually struggling to get enough songs for a record.”

Then there was the production on the record. After working with Ed Rose on its 2003 debut, I Am the Movie, and Mark Hoppus (formerly of Blink-182 and now with +44) on Commit This to Memory, the band split up production duties for the new album between former Cars frontman Ric Ocasek and the team of Adam Schlesinger (Fountains of Wayne) and Eli Janney (Girls Against Boys).

Ocasek and Schlesinger and Janney - naturally enough - had different approaches to producing Motion City Soundtrack. Schlesinger and Janney relished the idea of experimenting with the songs. “They sort of really dissected the songs,” Pierre says. “When we’d record a song, we thought we had it all figured out, and they’d be like 'OK, do we need to add anything? Do we need to take anything out? Let’s try this, let’s try this.' And we would keep doing that until we were happy with it and until our time was pretty much up for that studio. That was really wild.”

Ocasek, on the other hand, didn’t want to mess much with the songs he produced. “It was really strange because Adam and Eli really tore into the songs like vultures, but Ric sort of laid back,” Pierre says. “He liked the songs the way they were.”

There's one more major difference between the recording of this latest record and the former, and it has everything to do with Pierre. Even If It Kills Me is the first album he's recorded with Motion City soundtrack while sober.

Pierre didn’t actually seek help for his problem until his work on the album was essentially finished. That’s when a breakup with a girlfriend helped him to fall off of the wagon.

“After the breakup occurred, and right near the end of the record, I went out and just got completely obliterated on margaritas, and I woke up in a pool of vomit,” Pierre says. “So, yeah, that was really bad. Even after not drinking for a long time, you go out, and I just happen to be one of those people who can’t stop.”

Now clean and sober, Pierre counts himself among the artists who feel alcohol and drugs don’t enhance creativity, although that might not have been true before.

“I never wanted to believe I was one of those people who relied on drugs to do something. But I think I had somehow become that person, and I hated that more than anything,” Pierre says. “I do still consider this record a sober record, and if this is like a half-assed sober record, and if I can remain on this track until the end of time and space, then I think I’ll be able to go to even more places (creatively) I wasn’t aware of. So, I’m really excited because I’m pretty happy with this record and the way it turned out.”

Pierre has reason to be pleased with what he and his bandmates contributed to Even If It Kills Me. The album sticks pretty much to the guitar pop blueprint of the first two releases, but this is probably the band’s strongest set of songs yet, with crisp, new wave-ish tunes like “This Is for Real,” “Broken Heart” and “Fell in Love with You” delivering smart pop hooks and plenty of bouncy energy. Meanwhile, appealing mid-tempo songs like “Last Night” and “Hello Helicopter” and the piano ballad “The Conversation” suggest a growing sophistication in the band’s songwriting.

Pierre says Motion City Soundtrack is attempting to recreate the songs - especially those from “Even If It Kills Me” - as faithfully as possible live, even though it has strings and other instruments the band has never used on a CD before.

“We’ll probably do more stuff from the new record,” Pierre says. “I think what we’re going to try to do is just come up a few different (set list) options because we have a lot of crazy stuff on this tour where we have like a lot of lights and a weird stage setup and all this stuff that’s incorporated into it.”

Alan Sculley

WHO: I Was Totally Destroying It, Dear and the Headlights, Margot & the Nuclear So and So's, Motion City Soundtrack
WHERE: 40 Watt Club
WHEN: Friday, September 12
HOW MUCH: $13