You’re right, that is kind of poetic.
"Trouble on my tongue."
I guess we are poets.
Little trouble on my tongue over here.
So, the day we wrote this song, the day we came up with the idea, we were at a concert
venue called “The Bitter End” which is in New York City.
This tiny, little historic venue and Ryan – I believe – went into the bathroom and
saw a sticker on the wall that said, “The Weaklings.”
I guess a local band.
Yeah, a local band there and I remember thinking, “That’s a very AJR’ish thing to say.”
I’m weak, to be self-deprecating like that.
So, we brought it back to the living room and I remember the first thing we came up
with for this song was “I should stay strong, but I’m weak.”
That was the punchline of the song that we knew everything needed to be
circled around that idea.
Yeah, I think that lines means – kind of the feeling that you get at the beginning of the night
where you know there’s going to be trouble tonight.
Such a great night is in front of you and you don’t know that it could be generally
bad for you but that moment before you do it is the greatest feeling in the world and
you can’t say no to it, you know?
I feel like we’re just neurotic, worried, Jewish guys that grew up in this household
where everything is kind of bad for you.
And we were just raised like that.
For some reason in our brains we can’t shake that all of these vices are actually bad for us.
And specifically, for that line, we used a girl’s voice going, "One sip, one hit, one
kiss" and it's actually my girlfriend and she’s not a singer at all.
She was just over one day and we said, "Can you just do it" and she just did it.
And we wanted to give this temptation – temptress sort of feeling, "One sip.
One hit" – drawing us in, and I'm saying, "Bad for me."
Kind of like, conflicting emotions right there.
We all either go or went to Columbia in New York.
And he graduated.
And me and him are technically there now, but we’re taking time off.
And I did my freshman semester there and that happened once or twice a week.
I think I would be in my dorm working on something.
"I should go to sleep and get some rest" and my friends would knock on my door and
say, "Nope!
We’re going out."
And it’s just so hard to say no to something like that when I should be getting sleep and
I know I have to keep healthy, but I gave in every single time.
So, that exact situation happened again and again and again.
I think maybe everything in moderation because the song values giving into temptation.
But also if you go through it enough you’re going to abstain from taking part in some
of these things.
So, I think moderation is probably a good model to live by.
Our favorite band of all time is The Beach Boys.
We grew up on the music of the 1950’s and ‘60s.
Them specifically – even you can see – clothing wise, we take from them.
And I think our favorite producer of all time is Kanye West.
So, if you take those two influences – marry The Beach Boys songwriting with Kanye West
forward thinking production – You get AJR sound.
'Cause we have "Ooh waaaaaaa ee ya".
Which is very Beach Boys mixed with this hip hop – kind
of dirty beat and it creates something that throws our fan base off a little bit.
And I think that’s why they connect to our music so well.
Because they hear something and they’re like, "Oh wow.
There’s something else and there’s something else."
And you constantly want keep people’s brains moving.
In this song, we have a thing called "Spoke Step", which is something that we created.
You know how Dubstep takes a bass line and kind of messes it up?
We did the same thing with vocals.
And you hear it in a lot of radio songs now.
People kind of messing up vocals, but we try and take that to the next level.
And when they’re recording, they just spurt random sounds into the microphone and mess
them up completely.
Everything from like "AHH" to "BRR".
When you say "spurt" I just imagine me spitting all over the living room all over
the place.
That’s what it was.
That’s the image that we want, yeah.
Yeah but, that’s when he was going "Bah bah bah" – If you listen on the record,
it ends up sounding a lot cooler than what he was doing.