Will Rhodes of 'Til We're Blue Or Destroy
It has a beat and you can dance to it—even if it's incredibly sad
Felicia Graham
Til We're Blue Or Destroy at full capacity (Rhodes is fourth from right).
That dance-pop group ’Til We’re Blue Or Destroy is only now releasing its debut album feels like a clerical error: After all, the band—led by songwriter Will Rhodes—has been a staple on the Austin club circuit for nearly five years now, swelling from Rhodes’ solo studio project to a sprawling ensemble that encompassed nine members at its peak and racked up a considerable following. But the years between the self-titled record’s conception and its completion (with local über-producer Erik Wofford at the helm) have been well spent building a reputation as one of the city’s best-kept secrets, and now TWBOD finds itself in the rare position of releasing an album of songs that scores of fans already know by heart. Before the band’s dual release show with New Roman Times tonight, July 3, at Club DeVille, Decider spoke with Rhodes about the surprising personal drama concealed within his group’s otherwise joyful music, the logistics of wrangling a group that large, and how he feels about laying claim to one of the worst band names ever.
Decider: You’ve been promising this record since spring of ’08. Why the delay?
Will Rhodes: Most of it comes from me being scared to release it, to be honest. It’s the first thing I’ve ever made that I’ve really liked, and the first thing that I’ve felt was really me. It’s a really personal record. You just worry about it getting ripped on.
D: What about it is personal?
WR: When I did this record, I was going through a really hard time. I had to sober up because I lost my son. I wasn’t being the man I should be, and drinking a whole lot. So most of the lyrics are kind of me crying out—I don’t know to who, but they’re all about the things I didn’t like about myself. Making those songs was the only thing that made me feel better at the time. I’d call [Erik] Wofford up and be like, “I need to do this song right now.” There was this sense of urgency to it, to get my feelings onto tape immediately—and that also had a lot to do with who played on it. Whoever I could get to play drums, whoever could do the girl’s part at the time, that’s how it came together.
D: People might find that surprising, considering there’s a lot of joy in the music.
WR: People say that, yeah, but I think they’re happy songs and sad lyrics. Like, there’s a song called “Punk Rock Decisions” that I got from my old friend Dave Dondero, who’s one of my favorite songwriters, and it’s a true story about some friends who were hit by a drunk driver and killed. So when we play it live, I’m singing about that and watching people just dancing away. Half my songs are like that. When I sing, “Dance all night to keep the devil away” [in “Dead Girlfriends”], in my head I’m not dancing around. But when you invoke a happy beat or melody, you can say whatever the fuck you want. “Crazy Tigers” is about that summer six or seven years ago when seven of my friends who worked down here committed suicide: “Seven crazy tigers hung themselves tonight.” “Givin' Up On The High Side,” that’s about me giving up on a relationship, and how it’s hard when you have a kid, because you’re going to continue to have that relationship for the rest of your life. I found a book from the ’70s at the City-Wide Garage Sale that was just pictures—like, a guy doing the long jump, with lines underneath that say, “You can strive for all you want to achieve”—and I found this tearstained letter in the back that said something like, “I used this book all the time after my husband died.” I got a lot of the lyrics from that, and they’re all pretty sad to me because they all come from that book.
D: It’s hard enough scheduling with three people, let alone the 11 people who appear on the album. How did you work around that?
WR: When I started this, it was just me and Kyle Hunt from The Black Angels. I would write the songs and not tell people about them beforehand, and just have them come in and play, so this record is halfway a demo. We’re still learning how to play our record. It started out that way, but it’s gotten to the point where we really get by on a group of six people. We’re about to head out on the road in July, touring regionally every weekend, and it’s down to the six people who can come to practice three times a week. But yeah, having all those people was hard, and that got annoying. It’s hard to get everybody in sync with nine people, and I got tired of people showing up just to play [shows]. We still have Clint Myers play with us sometimes, but he’s out with Sleepercar, and Matt [Bricker] from The Polyphonic Spree will come play trumpet, and Miranda Brown is out with A.C. Newman. Those people come and go—and I love that, because they’re really good musicians who can just hop in and play—but it was never meant to be this big “ensemble” thing.
People used to compare us to [disbanded seven-piece San Marcos group] Clap! Clap!, like, “There’s so many people and everyone’s so happy!” Man, we’re just drunk. [Laughs.] I think our band’s kinda like The Replacements—not the music, but how you never know what you’re gonna get. I always get nervous when we’re playing after midnight, because I’m not gonna go around and tell everybody, “Don’t drink.” So sometimes we play really shitty, and sometimes it’s really great. We fly by the seat of our pants. You know, we’ve got 35 original songs we can play. You might get a show where we just say, “Fuck it” and we do seven covers. We have a gig coming up on a riverboat where we have to play for three hours—and we can actually play three hours of fucking material. There aren’t a lot of rock bands in Austin that can do that.
D: In 2007, The A.V. Club named you as having one of the worst band names of the year. How does that make you feel?
WR: That fucking rocks. You know, the name… The first time this band played together, it was as “Will Rhodes” at the Continental. And I looked at my name on the awning, and I was like, “That looks fucking horrible.” I was writing some lyrics the day after that, and one of them was [’Til We’re Blue Or Destroy], and it was as simple as that. The funny thing is when people make up meanings for it. There was one girl who was going through a breakup with her boyfriend—I won’t say who it is, but he played with us—and it was one of those things where if she’s yelling at him, she also has to come yell at me and tell me how shitty I am. So she showed up on my doorstep one day, like, “Do you know what your band name means?” And I’m like, “[Pauses.] No!” “It means that you’re either gonna commit suicide or kill someone! And y’all are gonna drink and do drugs until you die!” So she left, and I got right on the phone and called everyone, like, “I know what our band name means!” [Laughs.]
