AVC: Musically, it seems like you have a lot of momentum with this band—are you worried that an interruption might throw it off?
JW: Bands nowadays who take three years between albums—which seems to be par for the course—how come they're not losing momentum? That's what I always want to know. It seems they're getting away with it—
BB: It might even be a good thing, to let it settle and then let people sort of—
JW: All these things enhance each other; all the bands are going to enhance each other.
BB: I guess it would be the opposite of being sort of overexposed. If we just keep making records and we're always—
PK: Absence makes the heart grow fonder.
BB: Yeah, I like that. Sometimes it's "out of sight, out of mind," but when the next Raconteurs record comes out, whenever that is, I think we'll probably pick up right where we left off.
AVC: You're all living in Nashville now—was moving there a band decision?
JW: No—we all trickled down there one by one somehow.
BB: It's definitely convenient, but for me, there were bigger things at play. I really didn't like where I was living. I got robbed a couple times. I was visiting Jack down in Nashville quite a bit, and I really started to like it. Sort of fell in love with it—
JW: Neither of us could function in the Detroit music scene any more. It was just not healthy.
BB: The music or any other scene. It's really negative in so many ways.
AVC: So are you guys gone for good? JW: Oh yeah. Because of our involvement, even The Greenhornes' involvement in the Detroit garage-rock scene—or whatever you want to call it—I don't think we want to be involved in any more scenes ever again. We've had that experience, and it was a good one, and we've learned a lot from it, and I don't have any need to join into that ever again. It's too counterproductive to writing music and performing to the best of your abilities. It's okay when you're 20 years old—you're getting out there and you're learning—but not when you're 30 years old.
AVC: And Nashville is giving you that freedom?
JW: I'm extremely anti-hipster now, and I really hate the thought of it, being surrounding by them, and Nashville definitely is not in that neighborhood of their relation to music. In Nashville, those people want to sell songs, and they want to make hit records, and I don't see anything wrong with that. I'm so tired of playing the cool game with all those people, and just trying to go and have lunch and having to play that cool game with everybody, about what you're supposed to do, what's cool and what's not. It's a fucking minefield, you know? [Laughs.] You can't keep up. It's not healthy to write music that way, and I'd rather be in a town where they want to write hits.
BB: That's just not a nurturing environment. As an artist, I think it's really important to surround yourself with other artists—
JW: In Nashville, self-sabotage is not on the menu, and in hipster culture, self-sabotage is definitely one of the entrées.
JL: And that stuff is a virus, too—it's easy to hate something.
AVC: Did the adverse recording conditions affect Broken Boy Soldiers?
BB: Very much.
JW: Every album I've done pretty much has been not in a pleasant, quote-unquote, environment—it's freezing cold, or it was somebody's house with not-that-great equipment. It's always something that spurs on to get the job done. At ToeRag, we did Elephant—you couldn't even stand up, and it was freezing cold. And this one, blistering hot. We had to turn the fans off between takes to record. [Laughs.]
BB: There's something about working in adverse conditions. It keeps it interesting. I always notice if I ever sit down with a pen and piece of paper and a guitar, and I have a beverage and an ashtray and I'm comfortable on the couch, I fall asleep.
AVC: Are you worried that you might lose energy if you make yourselves too comfortable?
JW: No. It depends on how everyone wants to do the next record.
PK: I think we're going to be in the same situation as we were on the last record, where we're nine songs in and it's like, "Shit, we're making a record." We didn't even really think about it—we didn't have a band name or song titles.
AVC: It looks like you guys have been beaten up on the album artwork. What does that signify?
JW: It was that photographer Autumn de Wilde's idea. We did about 30 shoots that day—it was one of those things where, "Let's take as many photos as we can today, and as many different setups and situations." When we got the photo back, it just seemed to fit. We had a song, "Broken Boy Soldier," so we just made it plural, Broken Boy Soldiers, and that seemed to—we've been on the road with our other bands forever, and you can put in whatever metaphors you want, or we've all beaten each other up. The one thing I like about it is, it looks like we're all on the same page. We're together, whatever the situation and circumstances—it looks like these four guys are in the same spot right now.
PK: I like the idea, too, you always see old portraits of families or something, and maybe before, they were all wrestling around in the yard. It's kind of like the four brothers or something.
AVC: Since there's already a Raconteurs in Australia, you're The Saboteurs down there. Other than the fact that the name sounds similar, why did you choose something with such a different meaning?
BB: That ties into the album artwork—you were asking, "What does it signify?" Well, in actuality, that was the end result of a fight we had with the Australian Raconteurs. [General laughter.]
JW: The funny thing was, a guy in France we did an interview with, he was like, [Adopts French accent.] "So, you named your band The Raconteurs—that's a stupid name." To him, that's like naming an American band Storytellers. Good Storyteller. We should have called ourselves Saboteurs in France, too. So there you have it. We wanted to give them their own band, too—we didn't want to give them the second-rate version, like the U.S. Raconteurs or American Raconteurs. Although "Americanteurs" is kind of cool. [Laughs.]
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