/J Jackson from the garage-glam-rock band Saint Motel was nice enough to let me ask him a few questions yesterday.
Me: What are your influences, and what kind of music do you listen to?
A/J: I think Beethoven’s 7th symphony was the song that we remember affecting us the most when we were really young. I think that song probably is one of the strongest emotionally. Then my influences as a little kid were 50’s rock n roll kind of stuff, then I gravitated eventually to my parents’ records, Talking heads, Television, Blondie, the Beatles. We were looking to everything from Burt Bacharach to Petula Clark to Animal collective to Black Sabbath,…
Me: It is a large range!
A/J: It really is a large range.
Me: What are your musical guilty pleasures?
A/J: Um,… let me think about that,… I think there is one I have just listened to! I listen to pop music stations sometimes and there are a few pop songs that are some pretty good songs, there is one like (and he started singing ‘I’m only gonna break break your, break your heart’) I think it has Ludacris on it! … Then let’s see guilty pleasures, guilty pleasures um, um…(and after a lot of hesitations)… probably Enya, totally Enya!
Me: I read you all met in film school, how did this happen exactly?
A/J: It all kind of started around this school, in Orange county. The first day there I wanted to start a band, we started playing music in the basement and it is just what we all wanted to do, It was never a hard decision for usm we like doing it we like playing shows, we like making music.
Me: When did you start playing and writing music? At what age?
A/J: I personally started writing music when I was in 2nd grade, at about 7 years old, on piano, I used to play them to my little school music class and I would play my stupid little songs and that was kind of fun.
Me: How does attending a film school influence your music?
A/J: Well, I think in a couple of different ways, one is that there is a certain communal theme to music and film and both are usually used to telling stories or evoking certain feelings and what I really love is doing these two, to tell different stories and different aims,… two ways to express different ideas, but sometimes a song is very much like a movie in structure because stories have a typical structure and a typical song has an intro like a movie or a story, then you have the main body, then eventually you’ll go to a bridge or a pop twist then you have a cathartic dramatic resolution. Also I can’t help associate visuals with most songs, our songs and other songs, I have always kind of done that since I was a little kid, I love imagining where I would see this song, what I would see going on in the background, I would produce a music video in the back of my head.
Me: Why Saint Motel? What does the name mean?
A/J: Saint Motel? Saint Motel is a little place between LA and NY where the band hope to retire someday
Me: Between LA and NY ? Should I understand why?
A/J: Oh no it is just a nice place
Me: Is it an inside joke?
A/J: Kind of!
Me: There are videos for each of your songs and they are like little movies. It is something you were planning from the beginning but how much are you involved in the making of your videos?
A/J: A lot! I directed 4 of them, a friend of ours directed two, another friend directed one but the band and myself are pretty much involved in all the concepts.
Me: You do everything basically?
A/J: Yes, we do a lot of it
Me: Are you all writing your songs together or is somebody more involved in one song or is it a collective thing?
A/J: It’s kind of a collective thing, I bring in the basic idea usually, typically, and we kind of build on it and we kind of flesh it out .
Me: What is the inspiration behind songs like ‘Dear Dictator’ or ‘Pity party’?
A/J: For each song, the goal is to have his own unique reason for existence, each song is another possibility to say something different, have a different story and sometimes I like to go over the top and sometimes it’s tongue-in-cheek, it keeps us entertained! They all kind of have different meanings and interpretations
Me: Each song can have different interpretations you think?
A/J: Yeah I think so because people tell me what they think the song is about and it is not what I thought it was and I think it is kind of cool. That’s why I don’t like to explain what I think the song is about.
Me: What do you think about the connection between art and fascism? Because in the song and the video of ‘Dear Dictator ‘ there are obviously some references to fascism.
A/J (laughing): I don’t k
now sometimes some fascists have some great looks! I don’t know, I mean we didn’t really having this as a point of contention in the video, but there is something about an uniform or a military design that’s practical but sometimes really flamboyant and beautiful with medals and shiny objects and symmetry, it’s kind of a cool aesthetic.
now sometimes some fascists have some great looks! I don’t know, I mean we didn’t really having this as a point of contention in the video, but there is something about an uniform or a military design that’s practical but sometimes really flamboyant and beautiful with medals and shiny objects and symmetry, it’s kind of a cool aesthetic.
Me: How could you describe your sound? Your sound is hard to describe, Wikipedia describes it as ‘garage glam’ and ‘hard pop’, do you agree with that?
A/J: I like that it’s kind of difficult to describe, I think we don’t necessarily like being easily categorize so we are always trying to…It’s just kind of like we make the music we kind of make, … so there are a bunch of different descriptions, people refer to different things, it’s kind of cool, may be it’s not practical, may be we should be more specific but I personally like how varied responses are.
Me: Are you recording music right now? How different is it gonna be from your EP? Can you describe your upcoming first album?
A/J: Yeah it is different, we are recording right now and all I can say is that it is more extreme in many different directions than the EP was.
Me: More extreme in sound, in lyrics or both?
A/J: Both
Me: It’s gonna be your first album?
A/J: Yeah that is what we are in the process of recording
Me: Are you going to tour the east coast?
A/J: We owe to! We got some stuff in the work, hopefully we will announce that pretty soon, but this fall.
Ne: Are you planning to do other shows in LA? I know that you’re already playing at the Sunset Junction fair.
A/J: We are playing at the Sunset junction, at Lobster fest, we’re playing at USC, we’re playing in Utah next week for a couple days, I think we’re playing a couple of colleges in California in September as well. And we are now kind of organizing a secret show on September 11, but we are still kind of figuring out the details.
Me: Minneapolis is your hometown, what does it mean for you and your music?
A/J: A lot of the situations, the surroundings do have a lot to do with it, it has drastic changes in the seasons and there are a lot of things that are really unique about it, it’s a beautiful town, lots of really interesting people with a creative scene.
I moved away from it before I can really think of that but it was a good place to grow up. The ice and the snow and being indoors and making music, I’m pretty sure it had an influence on me.
Me: Thank you very much for doing this, anything to add?
A/J: Not really, we are making music and we are going to continue to do crazier and crazier things!