Covering Their Bases aMUSEd

Cover bands. Say what you will about them, but unlike their more successful and famous counterparts, they’ll always play the hits and won’t be snobby assholes about it. In Covering Their Bases, The A.V. Club asks a cover band to weigh in on a contentious issue regarding its corresponding band. In this edition, guitarist Sam Keller of the Muse tribute band aMUSEd talks to The A.V. Club before playing Jan. 29 at Goose Island about Queen, Twilight, and discovering a musical passion through Guitar Hero III.

The A.V. Club: First thing’s first: Why Muse?

Sam Keller: This is a little embarrassing. I got into Muse through Guitar Hero III. “Knights Of Cydonia” was one of the later tunes on there, and I was just screwing around playing it. I’d never heard of these guys, and I saw that one of my friends on Facebook liked them, so I said, “Hey, are these guys worth checking out?” She told me to get Black Holes And Revelations, and three tracks in, I was completely hooked. I’ve gone back and filled out the catalog and grabbed some live stuff, too. They’re just an interesting group that does a lot of things that no one else is doing.

AVC: And how did aMUSEd come together?

SK: Almost everyone in the group joined through Craigslist. We formed between April and June of 2010.

First, a buddy of mine started playing with me, and I thought, “How can we do more with this?” Then I thought, “Well, you know, if we form a band that’s in the cover genre, we can start playing shows.” Plus, anyone you pull into that group, they’re on board with the type of music we’re doing, the songs we’re doing, and really, it was just something I felt like we could recruit other musicians too, easily and with minimal conflict.

We were big Muse fans, and we’d just seen them come through the United Center with Silversun Pickups this March, so we thought we could do something like that. My friend introduced me to a keyboardist, and I started placing ads on Craigslist to get everyone else.

AVC: Muse is a trio, but aMUSEd is a quintet. Why the extra players?

SK: In Muse, Matt Bellamy plays guitars, keys, and sings with this freakishly high voice. Instead of trying to find one person who could do all that, we split his role into three parts in order to play the music as well as we possibly could. Two of those people are actually women, including the vocalist. We tried finding a male singer for a while, but it just wouldn’t work. As soon as we opened up the Craigslist ad to female vocalists, a couple of people jumped on it, including Jamie, the current singer. She’s awesome. She doesn’t have to reach for a higher register, and that really helps us bring some of that higher stuff out in force as opposed to dropping the songs down a couple of steps. She can really bring that vocal power to it.

AVC: Muse has a lot of critics, including local journalists and Sound Opinions hosts Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot. How do you respond to those critics?

SK: I’m not familiar with DeRogatis and Kot. The only real criticism I hear about Muse is people saying that they’re a Radiohead knockoff. I feel like that’s a rather uninformed criticism, frankly. Thom Yorke sings in a falsetto. Matt Bellamy sings in a falsetto. They both do cool stuff in different instrumentation. But I think Muse is a lot harder than Radiohead is, and a lot of what Radiohead writes is kind of based on personal experiences, and a lot of what Muse writes is political commentary. To me, they’re night and day different.

AVC: What about the whole “Muse sounds too much like Queen” thing?

SK: That’s one of the things that kind of drew them to me. I think their latest record, The Resistance, does that in particular. They do those whole Queen-type three-part harmonies.

But here’s the thing. Queen songs are big, right? Muse is big, especially from their second album on. Queen, if you think about it, wasn’t a stripped down band, but they really weren’t a massive production. They were just a four-piece that managed to crank out songs that sounded really big in the studio and when they were on tour. They would fill up stadiums with their songs, and that was unique about Queen. That’s what Muse does really well also.

AVC: You guys are allegedly the only Muse cover band in the United States, right?

SK: For a long time, we thought we were the only one in North America, but apparently there are some guys in Quebec.

AVC: Why do you think that is? Muse have been around for a long time, and they’re pretty huge, even in the U.S.

SK: I have no idea. One thing that blows my mind is that Muse isn’t bigger here.

AVC: They did seem to get more props this last record.

SK: They certainly got more airplay out of that than they were [getting] before. I saw them at the United Center, and it was pretty full. These guys, though, for their Black Holes And Revelations tour, they sold out Wembley Stadium two nights in a row.

It might be an interesting parallel to Queen, really. In the rest of the world, Queen was huge, but here, not really. Muse is huge everywhere but here.

AVC: I have to ask you about the whole Twilight thing.

SK: [groans]

AVC: Well, I mean, Stephenie Meyer liking Muse and repping so hard for them hasn’t hindered their popularity in the U.S. How’s it helping you out? You seeing a bunch of 15-year-olds at your shows?

SK: Our first all ages show is coming up this week, so it’s the first opportunity for any 18-year-olds to come and sing “Supermassive Black Hole.”

AVC: Oh, so you do the big Twilight song?

SK: We do it, yeah. I think we do the one from Twilight 2, and I can’t remember what was in the third movie. I think it gives them some extra exposure, and that’s probably a good thing. The band doesn’t seem to be too big of a fan back, though.

I don’t know. It would be nice if it was something less…

AVC: Twilight-y?

SK: Yes, Twilight-y. Actually, I was watching a DVD the other day, and a Muse song was the trailer music for that Johnny Depp/Angelina Jolie movie, The Tourist.

AVC: Well, that’s not supposed to be very good either.

SK: Yeah, that’s true.

AVC: Do you have any favorite songs to play?

SK: Frankly, we’re still getting our legs underneath us on this thing. We’ve only been playing songs for two and a half months right now, and we’re still evolving in terms of stuff that we’re really starting to play well, and stuff that we can pull off only when the stars line up. The songs that are really fun to play, though, are when the crowd really gets into it. When people are singing along and dance around, that kind of stuff.

AVC: So you guys have mega-fans already? Or does Muse just have mega-fans?

SK: There are always definitely some Muse fanatics out there in the audience. During our second show, we didn’t play this song “Citizen Erased,” which we’d played at our first show. It’s kind of an obscure song, and it’s seven minutes long. Anyway, we didn’t play it, and I distinctly heard some guy in the audience say, “What? No ‘Citizen Erased’ this time?”

AVC: I was reading on your band’s Facebook that you were in another cover band before this, right?

SK: I haven’t been playing guitar for all that long. I’m really just a couple of years into it, and before that, I’d taken a really long break from music, and then I came back to it with the guitar.

The band I was in, Gel, is kind of an interesting outfit. They play with sequencer tracks, and I worked with a woman in that band, and I said, “If you want another guitarist, or someone to play bass or something, let me know.” She said, “Yeah, we’ll get you in for our next show.”

Really, aMUSEd is just an extension of that. I don’t want to be sitting around at home, playing guitar to myself. I want to get out and be reaching people. I want to be playing out on stage. I would love to get into an original band, writing songs, and taking that out, but I work a day job, and if you go the cover band route, someone’s already done a lot of the hard work of getting those songs written. That’s something that’s made getting back into music much more accessible for me, and that’s why I’ve gravitated to it for now.

AVC: Plus, with all the summer festivals in Chicago, you can probably make some money out of it, rather than playing originals at some bar for free.

SK: We haven’t really turned on the money pipe yet, but it’s a lot easier to get 100 people in a room if they already know the songs.